The story
The painting Albanians like to call their own Mona Lisa belongs to this museum. Motra Tone, or Sister Tone, is a half-length portrait of a young woman from Shkodër, the old city of the north, painted in 1883 by Kolë Idromeno when he was twenty-three. It is often described as the first realist work in Albanian painting. For decades it carried a plainer title, Portrait of a Woman from Shkodër, and only after it entered the national collection in the 1950s did it become Sister Tone.
The gallery grew out of an arts committee formed in 1946 and first opened to the public in Tirana in January 1954. Twenty years later, in November 1974, it moved into its present building on the Boulevard of the Martyrs of the Nation, in the centre of the capital. Its more than five thousand works are strongest in the art of the communist decades, the socialist realism of partisans, factory workers and oil drillers that was the official style under Enver Hoxha, Albania's long-ruling party leader.
In the 2020s the building went through a long reconstruction meant to double its exhibition space, and the institution took a new name, the National Museum of Fine Arts. Statues of Lenin and Stalin, leftovers of that same era, spent years standing in the yard behind it.
