Selections from the Collection of Historic American Art

The historic American collection spans the history of American art from colonial times through 1980. These holdings include remarkable paintings by such distinguished artists as John Singleton Copley, Frederic Church, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, George Bellows, and Edward Hopper, which were purchased as the finest examples of contemporary art of their time. The historic American collection has been further strengthened by other significant acquisitions; for example, in 1996 Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr., donated 34 works by African American artists, including Aaron Douglas’s masterpiece Into Bondage (1936).

The Corcoran has particularly strong collections of Colonial and Federal-era portraiture, neoclassical sculpture, Hudson River School painting, art of the American West, American Impressionism, and early 20th-century realism. Its holdings include major works by painters such as Albert Bierstadt, Childe Hassam, and John Singer Sargent, and sculptors such as Paul Manship, Hiram Powers, and Bessie Potter Vonnoh. It also features a remarkable number of iconic works in the history of American art, including Samuel F. B. Morse’s House of Representatives (1822), Thomas Cole’s Departure and Return (1837), Frederic Church’s Niagara, Albert Bierstadt’s Last of the Buffalo (1888), Willard Metcalf’s May Night (1906), and George Bellows’s Forty-two Kids (1907).