Corcoran Gallery of Art

Run your hand along the pale marble at the corner of Seventeenth Street. It feels cool, even on a warm Washington afternoon. Above you, a long wall of stone runs down the block, broken by tall windows and crowned by a green copper roof. Traffic hums toward the White House a few streets away. Here, the city feels calmer. For more than a century, this building was one of the most important homes for art in the American capital.

The story starts with one man, William Wilson Corcoran. He was a Washington banker who made a large fortune in the middle of the nineteenth century. He also collected paintings and sculpture, and he wanted the public to see them. In those years, the United States had very few public art museums. Corcoran set out to build one in the capital, open to ordinary people as well as the wealthy.

Here is the first surprise. This marble building is not the original Corcoran Gallery. His first museum stands a short walk north, near the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue. It is a red brick building in the French style, designed by the architect James Renwick Junior. Today that building is called the Renwick Gallery, and the Smithsonian runs it. If you have time, walk past it later. The two buildings tell one story in two chapters.

That first building had a hard beginning. Construction was underway when the Civil War broke out in the 1860s. Corcoran sympathized with the South, and he spent the war years in Europe. Meanwhile, the Union Army took over his unfinished museum and used it as a supply depot and office. Only after the war did the gallery finally open to the public, in the 1870s. Corcoran's collection had a home at last.

The collection grew quickly, and so did the art school attached to it. Within a few decades, the brick building felt too small. So the trustees built the structure in front of you. It opened in the late 1890s, shortly after Corcoran's death. The architect was Ernest Flagg, a young New Yorker trained in Paris. He worked in the Beaux-Arts style. That is the grand, classical manner taught at the École des Beaux-Arts, the famous Paris school of fine arts.

Look at how Flagg handled the long facade. The walls are mostly solid stone, with fewer windows than you might expect. This was deliberate. Galleries need wall space for hanging paintings, and they need controlled light. Much of the light inside came from above, through skylights in the roof. From the street, the building looks closed and dignified. Inside, it was designed to glow with soft daylight from overhead.

Now move toward the main entrance and find the two bronze lions. They guard the steps, calm and heavy. They are copies of lions carved by Antonio Canova, the great Italian sculptor of the late eighteenth century, for a papal tomb in Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome. Many visitors walk past them without a second glance. But they tie this American building to the long European tradition it was trying to join.

Lift your eyes above the entrance. Carved into the stone are the words Dedicated to Art. That short phrase came from Corcoran's original vision. Along the upper walls, look also for carved names of great artists from earlier centuries. Flagg and the trustees were making a statement. This museum, in a young country, placed itself in the same story as the old masters of Europe.

Inside, the building was known for its atrium, a tall open hall lined with columns. Light fell through the roof onto marble floors and a grand staircase. In the 1920s, a new wing was added to hold a large collection left by William Andrews Clark, a senator and mining magnate from Montana. His gift included European paintings, carpets, and decorative arts. One famous piece was a complete gilded room from eighteenth-century Paris, moved here and rebuilt piece by piece.

The Corcoran collection was strong in American art. It held landscapes, portraits, and sculpture from the nineteenth century, when American artists were finding their own voice. Generations of Washingtonians came here to see works they could find nowhere else in the city. The art school trained painters, sculptors, and photographers. For many years, students worked in the same building where the collection hung. Learning and looking happened under one roof.

The second surprise comes from a more recent chapter. In 1989, the Corcoran cancelled a planned exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. His images were controversial, and Congress was arguing about public funding for the arts. The cancellation caused an uproar. Artists protested outside, and some people projected images onto this very facade. The episode became one of the best-known battles in the American debate about art, censorship, and public money.

In the early 2010s, the institution faced serious financial trouble. In 2014, the Corcoran Gallery closed as an independent museum. Its huge collection was divided. Thousands of works went to the National Gallery of Art, on the National Mall, and others went to museums and universities across the country. The building and the art school passed to George Washington University. Today the school continues as part of the university, under the Corcoran name.

So what you see now is a building with a changed purpose. Students carry portfolios up the steps where museum crowds once lined up. Parts of the interior still host exhibitions, so check what is open on the day you visit. The marble, the lions, and the carved words remain. The mission of teaching art still lives inside, even though the great collection now hangs elsewhere in the city.

Before you walk on, stand back across the street for a moment. Take in the whole length of the stone and the green line of the roof. Notice how quiet this corner feels, so close to the centre of American power. Then look down at the lions once more. They have watched presidents, protests, and students pass by. As you leave, listen for the city again, and remember the banker who wanted art for everyone.