Funded by Congress and private donation rather than the Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Art is one of the greatest art museums in the Western hemisphere.
The gallery was founded by the collection of Andrew Mellon, a Pittsburgh banker and Secretary of the Treasury who spent decades quietly acquiring masterpieces in Europe, including twenty-one paintings purchased from the Soviet Union's Hermitage Museum in 1930 and 1931, when the cash-starved communist government was secretly selling off Tsarist treasures.
Inside the West Building — the neoclassical marble structure before you — hangs the only Leonardo da Vinci painting in the Western hemisphere: Ginevra de' Benci, painted around 1474. It is small, intimate, and extraordinary. Leonardo was painting this young woman at roughly the same age as when Columbus crossed the Atlantic.
The East Building, designed by I.M. Pei in 1978, is a masterpiece of angular modernism — a sharp triangular structure in Tennessee marble whose distinctive corner has been polished smooth by the hands of millions of visitors running their fingers along the edge.
The gallery's collection spans from the thirteenth century to the present: Raphael, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Monet, Picasso, Degas, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt. It is free. It has always been free. Andrew Mellon stipulated it must never charge admission.
The Sculpture Garden between the two buildings has an ice rink in winter and jazz concerts in summer. In any season, it is one of the finest places to simply sit in Washington.