National Gallery. Washington. Great museums of the world

In 113 superb color photographs, the national gallery displays the magnificent heritage of master paintings given to the nation by its great collectors.
The national galery, youngest of the world’s
great museums, is the possessor of incomparable treasures. From its nucleus, the twenty-one stupendous masterworks once owned by Catherine the great of russia (acquired through intermediaries from the Hermitage by Andrew Mellon) it has grown to encompass the centuries from the 13th to the present by its very splendor attracting even greater gifts, including the Widener and Kress collections and the glories of French Impressionism presented by Chester Dale.
Now within these pages the reader, like the visitor entering the gallery’s classical porticoes and great rotunda, will find himself on a guided tour of the collections-arranged as in the museum itself to illumine the evolution of Western painting from Cimabue to Picasso.
Here he will find the whole range, from the great Hermitage treasures the jewellike 15th-century annunciation of Jan van Eyck, the Peru gino Crucifixion with its noble landscape, that most sumptuous Titian Venus with a Mirror-to the quieter pleasures of 18th century english landscape painting, and the haunting beauty of the portrait of ginevra de’ Benci (precursor to the mona lisa), the only Leonardo in the Western hemisphere.