French Impressionists - Monet, Renoir and the Dale Gift
A stop on Washington DC National Mall Walking Tour, a free self-guided tour.
The West Building's French galleries hold one of the best collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting in the world, and most of it arrived as gifts. The biggest came in 1962 from Chester Dale, a New York banker, whose bequest nearly tripled the gallery's 19th-century French paintings.
Look for Claude Monet's Woman with a Parasol, catching his wife and son on a windy hillside, and Auguste Renoir's A Girl with a Watering Can. Edouard Manet's The Railway shows a woman and a girl beside a train track in Paris. Vincent van Gogh's 1889 self-portrait, painted in the year after he cut his ear, is here too.
In a nearby gallery is Edgar Degas's Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, the original wax figure he showed in 1881, with a real cloth tutu.
Next, take the underground concourse to the East Building through the Multiverse.
More on Wikipedia: Chester Dale · Claude Monet · Little Dancer of Fourteen Years
Stops on this tour
- Washington Monument
- National Museum of African American History and Cu
- National Museum of American History
- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
- National Gallery of Art
- United States Capitol
- United States Botanic Garden
- National Museum of the American Indian
- National Air and Space Museum
- Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
- The Smithsonian Institution Building - The Castle
- Freer Gallery of Art
- Jefferson Memorial
- World War II Memorial
- Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
- Korean War Memorial
- Lincoln Memorial
- Vietnam Veterans Memorial
- White House Ellipse
- White House
- Lafayette Square