Tourist in My Hometown: Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art

I believe in traveling however you’re able—five-star hotel or road trip, another continent or just one town over. Tourist in My Hometown is a series about bringing that same curiosity a little closer to home. I’m exploring my hometown, Washington, D.C., the way I explore everywhere else—seeing the sights, trying the tours, and finding out what’s actually worth doing. Whether you’re between trips, travel isn’t in the cards right now, or you’re planning a trip to D.C. yourself, I hope these adventures inspire you to keep exploring—wherever you are.

We do things when traveling that we don’t normally do at home. Why is that?

I love exploring museums and art galleries when I’m on a trip, but for some reason, even though I live within minutes of a collection of world-class museums in D.C., enjoying them seems to be an activity I save for abroad.

I often talk about the incredible education you get through travel, and art appreciation and history have been some of the most exciting subjects I’ve been learning lately. Recent trips to the Vatican Museums and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam have left me a little enamored with art galleries. And with a London and Paris trip coming up this winter, I have firm plans to visit the V&A, Tate Modern and the Louvre—and I’m still sad about how much incredible art I’m going to miss while I’m there!

Meanwhile, I’ve been ignoring a world-class collection just twenty minutes down the street.

I joked with my kids earlier this week that I was going to the National Gallery of Art in D.C. as my “practice museum” before the Louvre. The NGA, in fact, has the only da Vinci painting on public display in the Americas—Ginevra de’ Benci—and you can walk right up and marvel at her, quite unlike her much more famous Louvre-residing cousin, the Mona Lisa.

The NGA was so much more than a practice museum!

I’d been two or three times before, but probably only once as an adult. Growing up in the area, I made the obligatory trips to the National Mall and its museums with my family and on school field trips. But as a busy mom and professional, I just haven’t gotten back enough.

Maybe that’s one of the things travel can do for you: open up worlds, hobbies and interests you didn’t know you had—or had forgotten about. For me lately, it’s been art and museums. And I’m incredibly lucky to have so many fantastic ones to explore right here in my hometown.

The Basics

The National Gallery of Art sits right on the National Mall, surrounded by some of D.C.’s other world-class museums and monuments. It first opened its doors in 1941 and, like so many of my favorite museums in D.C., admission is completely free.

A quick aside on free museums—they are fantastic for itinerary planning. If you’re spending $30 per person on admission somewhere, you understandably want to make the most of it. A free museum can certainly be an anchor in your itinerary, but it can also be a “maybe if we have the energy” stop, a rainy-day option, or somewhere to fill an unexpected free hour. You can pop in to see one masterpiece or spend an entire afternoon without worrying about “getting your money’s worth.”

Back to the NGA.

The museum is divided into three distinct parts. The original West Building, opened in 1941, contains the older part of the collection, with works spanning the 11th through the 19th centuries. This is where you’ll find Renaissance paintings, Dutch masters, French Impressionists, and names like da Vinci, Raphael, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, and Monet.

The East Building, more recently opened in 1978, is home to modern and contemporary art—and feels dramatically different from the West Building before you even look at a painting.

Finally, there’s the Sculpture Garden, which opened in 1999 and occupies six acres beside the museum. More than 20 modern sculptures are spread throughout the garden, which also hosts events and even has an ice-skating rink in winter.

If you’re visiting for the first time, get a map. This place is big.

The Art

Oh. My. Goodness. How did it take me so long to get here?

I’ve been practically salivating in anticipation of the art I’m going to see in London and Paris this winter—researching museums, looking at paintings online, and already worrying about all the things I won’t have time to see. Meanwhile, this collection has been down the street from me all along.

I started in the West Building, where a grand marble Rotunda modeled after the Pantheon in Rome separates the galleries. From there, you can essentially travel through centuries of Western art, which turned out to be especially interesting after my recent visits to the Vatican Museums and the Rijksmuseum.

I started with the early Italian and Renaissance galleries.

One thing becomes obvious pretty quickly in the early Italian galleries: there is a lot of religious art. Madonnas and children. Saints. Crucifixions. Biblical scenes. For centuries, the Church was the primary patron of the arts, commissioning works for churches and other religious spaces. Wealthy families commissioned religious art too, often for churches or their own private devotion. As the Renaissance progressed and patronage expanded, you begin to see more portraits, mythology, landscapes, and scenes from everyday life.

This was something I had started to understand at the Vatican Museums, and suddenly I was recognizing it here. I wasn’t just walking through rooms full of very old religious paintings anymore. I understood a little more about why I was seeing what I was seeing.

And honestly, the religious imagery itself isn’t what moves me most. It’s the age of these paintings that I find almost impossible to wrap my head around. Some of the works in these galleries were created more than 600 years ago. They have survived wars, political upheaval, changing borders, changing tastes, and generations of people—and now I’m standing a few feet away from them in my hometown.

And then there was da Vinci. And that brought me back to my “practice museum” joke.

The NGA’s Ginevra de’ Benci, painted in the 1470s, is the only painting by da Vinci on public display in the Americas. That fact alone makes her worth seeing. But what struck me most was how accessible she was. There was no massive crowd gathered in front of her, no fighting for a glimpse over someone’s shoulder. I could walk right up and really look.

And I did.

Knowing I’ll be seeing the Mona Lisa at the Louvre this winter, I found myself looking for similarities—the expression, the eyes, the way da Vinci painted the face—and trying to commit Ginevra to memory so I can compare the two when I see her much more famous cousin in Paris.

This is exactly the kind of thing I love about the way travel builds on itself. I’m looking at art differently because of places I’ve already been, and now something I saw twenty minutes from home is going to change the way I look at something in Paris.

From Italy, I moved into the Dutch galleries, and this time I had another recent trip in the back of my mind: Amsterdam.

At the Rijksmuseum, I’d seen Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride and The Nightwatch, Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, several paintings of Rembrandt’s wife Saskia, and plenty of other Dutch masterpieces. So when I walked into these galleries at the NGA, much of what I was seeing felt familiar.

One painting I spent some time with was Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance, painted around 1664. A woman stands quietly holding an empty balance while pearls and gold sit on the table in front of her—and behind her hangs a painting of the Last Judgment. There’s plenty of room for interpretation, but the connection between weighing something of material value and ultimately being weighed yourself is hard to miss.

And then there were the pearls. So many pearls.

I had noticed them in paintings at the Rijksmuseum, and here they were again—earrings, necklaces, little points of light against dark clothing. Pearls were valuable status symbols in 17th-century Dutch society, but depending on the painting, they could carry other associations too, including beauty, purity, or even vanity. I’m starting to love noticing these recurring details and wondering why the artist put them there.

I was looking at the light differently, too. Rembrandt is famous for his dramatic use of light and shadow, and I remembered learning about what is now called the “Rembrandt triangle”—where light falling across a face leaves a small triangle of illumination beneath the eye on the shadowed side. It’s one of those details I most definitely never would have noticed a few years ago. Now I was looking for it.

That may be one of my favorite things about becoming more interested in art. Not long ago, I would have walked through these rooms and thought, “That’s a beautiful painting.” Now I’m noticing the light. I’m noticing the jewelry. I’m wondering about symbolism. I’m learning how to view it.

From there, I moved on to Van Gogh, an artist I had also recently encountered at the Rijksmuseum. I’d seen several of his works there, including one of his self-portraits, but I didn’t have time to visit the Van Gogh Museum—which is reason enough for me to return to Amsterdam.

Van Gogh is considered a Post-Impressionist, not an Impressionist, although to my decidedly non-art-historian eye, I respond to both in much the same way. I love the bright colors, the visible brushstrokes, and especially the landscapes. After moving to Paris in 1886, Van Gogh was exposed to the work of the Impressionists, and his palette became dramatically brighter.

The colors are emotional.

One of my favorites at the NGA was Farmhouse in Provence, painted in 1888 after Van Gogh moved to the south of France. It’s a simple subject—a farmhouse surrounded by fields and trees—but the colors are anything but simple. The bright yellow of the field, the blues and greens of the landscape, and the strong outlines make the whole scene feel more vivid than real life. It’s exactly what I mean when I say the colors are emotional.

The subject itself is ordinary. Van Gogh’s color is what makes me want to keep looking.

And then I got to the Impressionists.

This is where it hit me.

I already knew I liked Impressionism, but standing in these galleries made me realize just how much. There’s something about the color, the light, and even the lack of precision that appeals to me. A landscape doesn’t have to show me every leaf on every tree. I like that the edges can blur and the brushstrokes can remain visible—that I get to participate a little in what I’m seeing.

Monet, especially, got to me. The NGA has several of his paintings, and Woman with a Parasol—Madame Monet and Her Son stopped me in my tracks. Painted in 1875, it captures Monet’s wife Camille and their son on what feels like an entirely ordinary moment outdoors. But it’s the light and movement that make it extraordinary—the wind in her dress and veil, the clouds moving behind her, the sunlight and shadows. It’s the difference between a movie and a photo.

That fascination with light is one of the things I love most about Impressionism. Paint the same place at a different hour, in different weather, or during another season, and you can create an entirely different painting.

And then there’s The Japanese Footbridge, painted at Monet’s garden in Giverny. The bridge is there, the water lilies are there, but the scene isn’t rendered with crisp edges and perfect detail. Color and reflection take it over. You know what you’re looking at, but there’s still room for your interpretation in the painting.

What really fascinated me, though, was seeing how differently Monet could use those same tools. Interior, after Dinner is dark and, to me, almost stressful. Instead of the bright landscapes I associate with him, the room feels heavy and the people seem disconnected from one another.

The color is still creating emotion—it’s just creating an entirely different one.

I literally got choked up looking at these paintings. I can appreciate the astonishing technical skill required to create something like Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. But this is the art that makes me feel something. Makes me emotional. The lack of perfect definition leaves room for mystery and interpretation. That’s what I love.

I came into the NGA knowing I liked Impressionism. I left knowing why.

From there, I headed underground.

The West and East Buildings are connected by an underground passageway, but even the walk between them is part of the museum experience. A moving walkway takes you through Multiverse, an installation by artist Leo Villareal made up of thousands of LED lights that flicker and race along the tunnel around you.

It’s a pretty perfect transition. You leave the marble, columns, and centuries-old galleries of the West Building, travel through this futuristic tunnel of light, and emerge somewhere that feels starkly different.

The East Building is modern, open, and airy, and houses the NGA’s modern and contemporary collection. After spending the morning with da Vinci, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, and Monet, I was suddenly looking at an entirely different kind of art.

I’m still learning how to appreciate modern art.

With much of the art I’d just seen in the West Building, even when there were layers of symbolism I didn’t understand, I generally knew what I was looking at—a person, a landscape, a scene from the bible. Modern art asks something different of me. Sometimes I have to stand there for a minute. Sometimes I have to read the description.

Sometimes I still have absolutely no idea what I’m looking at.

And I kind of like that.

Picasso was a good place to start. Even when he’s painting a recognizable subject, the shapes, proportions, and colors don’t necessarily look the way they’re “supposed” to look. I’m beginning to appreciate that more—the idea that a painting of a person doesn’t have to look much like a person.

One of the Picassos that caught my attention was Harlequin Musician, painted in 1924. At first, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking at. I could make out a person and what looked like a small guitar, but the figure is broken into strange shapes, patterns, and wildly unrealistic proportions. Once you know it’s a harlequin, the diamond-patterned costume and guitar begin to bring it all into focus.

That’s part of what I’m beginning to appreciate about modern art. I had to spend a little more time with this one. The subject was there; Picasso just wasn’t going to hand it to me.

Picasso was only the beginning. The East Building includes works by many of the biggest names in modern and contemporary art, and I could easily have spent another couple of hours here. But by this point, I was running out of time.

Case in point: I didn’t make it to the Rothkos. The NGA has an important collection of works by Mark Rothko, and I had every intention of seeing them. I did, however, make it to the gift shop, where I found plenty of Rothko merchandise!

Missing them doesn’t bother me too much, though. If anything, it reinforced something I’d realized over the course of the day—the NGA is not a museum I need to “finish.” I can easily come back.

And I will.

The Visit

Overall, the National Gallery of Art is easily deserving of an entire day on a D.C. itinerary. But because admission is free, it also works remarkably well if you have much less time. If you’re only in D.C. for a quick trip—or even here on business—you can pop in just to see one or two paintings on your must-see list without buying a ticket or feeling like you need to see the entire museum.

And despite visiting on a Saturday, I never felt overwhelmed by crowds. Even in the galleries with some of the most famous works, I could take my time, get close to the paintings, and take the photos I wanted. After experiencing some much busier museums while traveling, that felt like a luxury.

If you do have the time, I’d give yourself at least half a day. Spend a couple of hours exploring the West Building, take a break for lunch at one of the museum cafés, then cross through Multiverse and give the East Building another couple of hours. And leave time for the gift shop—it’s an awesome one!

Or don’t try to do it all. I didn’t. I missed the Rothkos, barely scratched the surface of the East Building, and didn’t make it outside to the Sculpture Garden at all. That may be one of the best things about having a world-class museum in your hometown: I don’t have to see everything this time.

Where is the closest art gallery to you?

Are you between trips? Maybe travel isn’t in the budget right now, or health, work, family, or life in general is keeping you closer to home. Here’s your reminder that travel doesn’t have to mean another country or even another state. Travel is about learning and exploring.

Many times, there are things worth exploring right where you are.

I went to the NGA because travel had made me more interested in art. But somewhere along the way, I realized something else was happening. The Vatican Museums had taught me a little about why all those centuries-old religious paintings exist. The Rijksmuseum had taught me to notice the light, the pearls, and the symbolism. Van Gogh and Monet were helping me figure out what kind of art makes me feel something.

Travel hadn’t just taught me to appreciate art. It had taught me how to see it.

And now that works both ways. Exploring those interests while I’m home makes me even more excited—and a little more prepared—for what I’ll see on my next trip.

So yes, “practice museum” was always a joke. The National Gallery of Art certainly doesn’t need to practice for anything. But after spending a day with da Vinci, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, and so many others so close to home, I’m more ready than ever to see what’s waiting for me in London and Paris this winter.

And in the meantime, I think I have a few more hometown museums to visit.