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North side of the Mall, Constitution Ave between Third and Seventh sts NW; closest Metro stop is Archives-Navy Memorial. Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 11am-6pm. Admission free. tel 202/737-4215, Though the visually stunning National Gallery of Art , the nearest of the Mall museums to the Capitol, is not in fact a government institution, it fully deserves its name. It owes its prominence to the efforts of the industrialist Andrew Mellon , who bought the building and donated most of the paintings. Many were purchased from the cash-poor post-revolutionary government of the USSR, where they had previously hung in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Mellon's family has continued as benefactors, raising countless millions to build I.M. Pei's modernistic East Building in 1978. The original Neoclassical gallery, designed by John Russell Pope in 1941, is now called the West Building and holds the bulk of the permanent collection. Parts of the collection are rotated or sent out on tour, and some rooms may be closed for renovation. To find a particular work, visit the interactive Micro Gallery in the West Building (main floor, Mall entrance). From the domed central rotunda, where you can pick up a floor plan and gallery guide, a vaulted corridor runs the length of the building. If you only have limited time, latch onto one of the informative daily free tours - ask for a schedule at the information desk. Galleries to the west on the main floor display major works by Renaissance masters, arranged by nationality: half a dozen Rembrandts fill the Dutch gallery, Van Eyck and Rubens dominate the Flemish , and El Greco and Velazquez face off in the Spanish , near eight progressively darker Goyas. There's also the only Leonardo in the US, the 1474 Ginevra de' Benci , painted in oil on wood, plus works by Botticelli, Crivelli and Raphael - including the latter's celebrated Alba Madonna (1520), one of Mellon's purchases from the Hermitage. The other half of the West Building holds an exceptional collection of nineteenth-century French paintings - Gauguin from Pont-Aven to Tahiti, a couple of Van Goghs, some Monet studies of Rouen Cathedral and water lilies, Cezanne still lifes and the like. At either end of the building, the skylit, fountain-filled Garden Courts make an ideal place to rest weary feet, while Salvador Dali's The Last Supper overlooks the escalators down to the cafe. The triangular East Building houses twentieth-century paintings and sculpture. As in the Guggenheim in New York, the attention-grabbing spatial choreography of the architecture all but overpowers the works of art. You emerge from under the oppressively low entrance into a central atrium, from where an escalator, literally carved out of a 40ft granite wall, climbs to the main galleries - which, squeezed into the corners, can seem like an afterthought. Exhibitions change and go on tour throughout the year, so the bulk of the permanent collection is rarely on display. Nonetheless, you may catch Picasso's haunting  © 2003 by Rough Guides Ltd. as trustee for its Authors. Published by Rough Guides. All rights reserved. Rough Guides name is a trademark of Rough Guides Ltd. Buy the book here!
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Family of Saltimbanques and the very blue The Tragedy , as well as Giacometti bronzes and paintings, plenty of Alexander Calder (whose huge red-and-black mobile is usually in place), early Miros, some Warhol soup cans and Chuck Close's Fanny - a finger painting par excellence . The underground concourse that links the two buildings contains a good bookstore, an espresso bar and a large cafeteria - topped by pyramidal skylights and bordered by a glassed-in waterfall.
Your Tips For National Gallery of Art
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