Description:                                

Located a block south from the White House, the Corcoran Gallery of Art houses a collection of more than 12,000 works, which are displayed in a building deemed one of the finest examples of Beaux Arts architecture in Washington. Founded in 1869 and completed in 1897, the Corcoran building was the city’s first public building to be designed as such and was Washington’s first art museum. It is one of the three oldest museums in the United States, ranking with Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Corcoran building is actually the second home for the artworks collected by William Wilson Corcoran (1798-1888), as the collection was first housed in a building at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, known today as the Renwick Gallery.




The Corcoran’s impressive collection is devoted to fine European and American art. European holdings include various masterpieces. For instance, the Clark Collection is renowned for its Dutch, Flemish and French paintings. Highlights here include the “Salon Doré,“ an eighteenth-century French period room from the hôtel de Clermont in Paris. The Walker Collection holds examples of the French Impressionist movement (late-19th and early-20th centuries), including works by Renoir, Monet, Courbet, and Pissarro.


The Corcoran’s American galleries characterize the development of American art throughout the ages, with numerous paintings that depict and examine early American portraiture, landscape and European influence on American art. Notable pieces include the Hudson River School landscapes and other important American paintings by Albert Bierstadt, John Kensett, John Singer Sargent, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and others. In addition to an impressive painting collection, the Corcoran is renowned for its devotion, organization, and surveillance of historic and modern photography.


Highly regarded among Washington’s art community, the Corcoran College of Art and Design is the only professional and fully accredited college of art and design in the city. Students may receive a four-year professional Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Graphic Design, Fine Art, and Photography.

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