One attitude of the British the American did keep was the disregard for any state-housed collections of art. The British had an enormously valuable collection of artworks by Robert Walpole they could have taken for their own national museum,, but instead went to Catherine the Great of Russia for her Hermitage. The United States likewise did not even conceive of a national gallery until the 1920s, when financier and art collector Andrew W. Mellon began assembling works that would make up the foundational collection of a national art museum.

On this day, March 17, in 1941, four years after Congress formally resolved to accept Mellon’s collection and began designing and building out the structure, the National Galley of Art in Washington D.C. opened to the public.

The original collection focused heavily on the classical artists: Monet, Rembrandt, da Vinci, and their contemporaries. In 1978 a second, eastern, building was added to house the modern collection, with works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, among many others.