Corcoran Gallery of Art

The Corcoran Gallery was, from 1869 to 2014, one of the oldest private art museums in the United States, housed two blocks from the White House in the splendid Flagg Building of 1897, a marble Beaux-Arts pile. Banker William Wilson Corcoran had endowed the collection with a focus on 19th-century American art; works like Frederic Edwin Church's Niagara and Hiram Powers's Greek Slave were among its highlights. In 2014 the institution was dissolved after years of financial trouble: the collection of around 17,000 works went to the National Gallery of Art, the building to George Washington University, and the attached art school continues as the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design. Today visitors can freely enter the foyer with its grand double staircase during university hours and occasionally see student exhibitions in the atrium.