Renwick Museum
a.k.a. Old Corcoran Art Gallery
NE corner, 17th St. and Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, DCThe Joint Committee on Landmarks has designated the Renwick Museum a Category II Landmark of importance which contributes significantly to the cultural heritage and visual beauty of the District of Columbia, This French Renaissance building by James Renwick successively served as a Civil War quartermasters headquarters, the original Corcoran Gallery, and the home of the Court of Claims. It is presently being restored as a future museum facility for the Smithsonian Institution.
W. W. Corcoran, a wealthy retired Washington merchant and banker whose firm had underwritten the entire U. S. loan for the Mexican American War (1846-48), determined in the late 1850s to build a public art gallery in the Nation's Capital. One of America's first great patrons of the arts, Corcoran hired architect James Renwick to design a building to house his notable collection of paintings and statuary on a site near Lafayette Park and the White House, Renwick, who had designed New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral in the Gothic style and Washington's Smithsonian Building in Lombard Romanesque, designed a building for the Corcoran Gallery which may be the first French Renaissance structure erected in the United States.
The building, begun in 1859, was near completion when the Civil War broke out. Corcoran, a southern sympathizer, was soon a self-exile to Europe. By August of 1861, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs had seized the building for use as the clothing Department of the Union Army. In 1861 after $30,000 of remodeling, Meigs moved his own office into the building and such occupancy continued until four years after the close of the war.
When the gallery was restored to Corcoran in 1869, he immediately deeded it to a board of nine trustees to be held forever as an art gallery for the public. After Congress incorporated the Corcoran Gallery of Art, exempt from taxation, on May 24, 1870, the lengthy reconstruction of the gallery to its original design and purpose was begun. Although Corcoran gave a charity ball in the building for the Washington Monument Society on February 22, 1871, it was not until January 19, 1874, that the gallery was finally opened to the public. The cost of the building and its site has been estimated at $250,000; the value of the original collection at $100,000 with an endowment of $900,000 for the maintenance and growth of the institution.
The collection quickly outgrew its building, however, and by 1891, only three years after Corcoran's death, the present 17th Street site of the gallery was purchased. The new building, designed by Earnest Flagg, was completed in 1897 and the gallery left its original home. In 1899 the Attorney General, by authority of Congress, first rented and soon purchased the old gallery for the use of the U. S. Court of Claims. The Court of Claims, which was established in 1855 to provide persons having claims against the U. S. Government a means to obtain satisfaction, occupied the building until 1963.
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1969.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.