The story
The building at 1250 New York Avenue in Washington went up in 1908 as a Masonic temple, a place women were not allowed to enter. Since 1987 it has housed a museum devoted entirely to art made by women.
The idea began with a gap in a textbook. On a trip to Europe in the 1970s, the collectors Wilhelmina and Wallace Holladay saw still lifes by Clara Peeters, a Flemish painter of the 1600s, and then found no mention of her in the standard survey of art history. They started buying work by women, incorporated a museum in 1981 and bought the old temple in 1985. Barbara Bush, then the vice president's wife, cut the ribbon two years later. A renovation of about $66 million closed the museum in 2021, and it reopened in October 2023.
The collection spans five centuries. Judith Leyster, the Haarlem painter whose pictures were long sold under the name of Frans Hals, is here with The Concert, three musicians playing and singing together. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, portraitist to Marie Antoinette, painted Princess Belozersky in 1798, during her years in Russia. Berthe Morisot's The Cage and Suzanne Valadon's The Abandoned Doll, painted in 1921, carry the story into modern Paris.
