National Gallery of Art

In 1930 and 1931 the Soviet government, badly short of cash for its industrial plans, quietly sold masterpieces out of the Hermitage, the old imperial museum in Leningrad. One of the buyers was Andrew Mellon, a Pittsburgh banker who was at that moment the United States Treasury Secretary. Through intermediaries he bought 21 paintings for more than 6.5 million dollars, among them Raphael's Alba Madonna and Jan van Eyck's Annunciation, pictures that had hung in the palaces of the Russian tsars.

Mellon was collecting for his country as much as for himself. The United States still had no national gallery, and he meant to give it one. In January 1937 he offered his paintings and the funds for a building to the nation, and Congress accepted the gift that March, on his 74th birthday. He asked that the museum carry the country's name, so that other wealthy collectors would feel free to add their own pictures to a gallery open to everyone.

He chose the architect John Russell Pope, who designed a domed neoclassical hall of pale Tennessee marble on the National Mall. Neither man saw it finished, dying within days of each other in 1937, months after the first ground was broken. The gallery opened in 1941, and other collectors gave as Mellon had hoped, so its rooms now hold Ginevra de' Benci, the only Leonardo painting in the Americas, beside the Raphael he had bought from the Hermitage. A sharp-angled East Building by I. M. Pei was added across the plaza in 1978 for modern art.