Corcoran Gallery of Art: American Paintings to 1945America's first art museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art was founded in 1869 by the wealthy Washington, D.C. banker and philanthropist William Wilson Corcoran (1798--1888). The museum was established from the private collection. Corcoran began in about 1850, and since that time its American paintings collection has grown to more than five hundred works dating from 1718 to 1945. These holdings include a remarkable number of iconic works in all genres of American painting. This list includes Samuel F.B. Morse's The House of Representatives (1822); Rembrandt Peak's Washington before Yorktown (1824--25); Thomas Cole's The Departure and The Return (1837); Frederic Edwin Church's Niagara (1857); John Singer Sargent's En route pour la peche (1878); Thomas Eakins's Singing a Pathetic Song (1881); Albert Bierstadt's The Last of the Buffalo (1888); George Bellows's Forty-two Kids (1907); and Aaron Douglas's Into Bondage (1936). The collection also boasts outstanding breadth and depth in Hudson River School painting, nineteenth-century portraiture and genre painting, American Impressionism, and early twentieth-century realism. |
