Everyman's Palace

The U.S. was the last of the great Western nations to possess a national gallery of art. Yet now, less than 14 years after its dedication, the National Gallery in Washington ranks with the world's finest. The gallery's principal offering is a grand tour of Western art—from stiff but splendid beginnings in Siena and Florence right through to the skyrocket flash and fizzle of modern times. Casual visitors may make the tour in a day, students in a decade; the gallery is solidly studded with masterpieces.

Fat Cushions & Big Lights. Washington cab drivers are likely to refer to the museum as "the Mellon gallery," which is just what its founder, Financier Andrew Mellon, hoped to avoid. He wanted to build no personal monument but a palace for Everyman, which would be a lasting glory to the nation. The neoclassic building cost Mellon $15 million, is as palatial as any structure to be found in the Western Hemisphere. Its central dome was modeled on the Pantheon in Rome. The rotunda and windowless exhibition wings are constructed of over 40 kinds and shades of marble, from "Istrian Nuage" (Italy) to "Vermont Radio Black," and enclose five acres of exhibition space. There are fat-cushioned couches for the foot-weary, and fountain courts ringed with fishtail palms to soothe the eye-weary. Behind the scenes is an air-conditioning system that gulps 5,000 gallons of water a minute. Some 600 lamps, like those used for night baseball, glow softly through the diffusion-glass ceiling.

In turning his own collection over to the gallery, Mellon urged that it be used as a criterion for further acquisitions in order "to prevent the introduction ... of inferior works of art." To assure a continuing high standard, he set up a self-perpetuating board of trustees which examines all gift horses with a dentist's doubtful eye. Since Mellon's death in 1937, vast bequests from Samuel Kress and Joseph Widener (old masters), Lessing Rosenwald (prints and drawings) and Chester Dale (old masters and modern French paintings) have swelled the collection. It now numbers 1,721 paintings, 1,696 sculptures (mostly small), 21,451 prints and drawings, 22,000 watercolor renderings and photographs of American art objects (made under WPA auspices), 815 objects of decorative art, and 1,436 photographs from Alfred Stieglitz' collection. Total worth: more than $200 million.

Happily for future donors, almost a third of the gallery remains to be filled. Director David Finley is in no hurry to fill it. "We would like to be not one of the largest galleries," he explains, "but one of the best." The truth is that European masterpieces in private hands grow fewer every year, while laws prohibiting their export from most European countries make them ever harder to obtain.