The National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity. In the first large survey published in more than 20 years, this lavish volume celebrates 400 of the most beloved works from the nation’s museum.

Essays, personal meditations, and images that explore water in all its renewing, destructive, corrosive, and connecting power.

A 300-year history of influential artist training academies in more than a dozen countries

The National Gallery of Art draws excited visitors year-round into our French impressionism galleries. Now you can experience 50 of our most popular works from the comforts of home.

Take a visual journey through early America with treasures from the National Gallery of Art. 

The first volume in the new series Art & signals a bold vision for a more dynamic study of art.

The National Gallery of Art conservation journal, now available open access in 2025

The Stars We Do Not See brings together standout pieces from the National Gallery of Victoria's globally recognized collection of works by Indigenous artists in an unprecedented presentation of First Nations Australian art and design.

Examine photography’s many roles in art, journalism, fashion, portraiture, and more during the dynamic evolution of the Black Arts Movement. 

A beautifully illustrated publication traces the connections between artists, naturalists, and collectors in an age of scientific discovery and broadening horizons.

Ten leading scholars broaden our understandings of modernism by centering Black artists and experiences with beautifully illustrated essays.

This award-winning book highlights Elizabeth Catlett’s remarkable career centered on activism and artistic expression.

An ideal introduction to the National Gallery of Art, this book highlights fifty paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photographs, and more from the museum’s collection. Selected from more than 150,000 works in the museum’s vast collection, these remarkable examples of European and American art span centuries of human creativity.

Delve into the origins of impressionism through the 1874 exhibition that is considered the birth of this French art movement.

A leading art historian presents a new grammar for understanding the meaning and significance of print.

This exploration of Mark Rothko’s paintings on paper transforms our understanding of a preeminent 20th-century artist.

An expansive look at portraiture, identity, and inequality as seen in Dorothea Lange’s iconic photographs.

Some 50 works by today’s most innovative Native American artists share a common thread of the land.

Explore the inseparable histories of modernist abstraction and 20th-century textiles in this richly illustrated volume.

Volume 6 explores the themes of workshops and studios in different cultural contexts and various media.

The most celebrated sculptor of the neoclassical age, Antonio Canova (1757–1822) established himself as the preeminent artist of his time with his funerary monuments and meticulously carved marbles on classical themes. Although his idealized and sensual sculptures are widely known, this is the first book devoted entirely to the brilliantly expressive clay models that he quickly made in preparation for his marble sculptures. 

A vivid historical imagining of life in the early United States.

This book examines the legacy of influential Black artists in the nation’s capital as well as the key institutions and communities that contributed to the Washington Black Renaissance.

A profound examination of the complex constructs that have kept “outsider” and self-taught artists on the margins of the mainstream.

An authoritative and comprehensive celebration of the life and work of one of the most prominent artists of the Venetian Renaissance

Scores of the artist’s dazzling watercolors, oil paintings, and drawings, from landscapes and seascapes to architectural studies, scenes of everyday life, and sympathetic portraits of the Roma and other local people he encountered.

This groundbreaking examination of the “double” in modern and contemporary art accompanies the National Gallery of Art exhibition The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900. Richly illustrated throughout, The Double is a multifaceted exploration of an enduring theme in art, from painting and sculpture to photography, film, video, and performance.

Generously illustrated with rare works from the National Gallery’s collection of early aquatints, this book explores how European artists harnessed the medium’s potential to exchange information and ideas during the Enlightenment.

Based on her 2011 Mellon Lectures held at the National Gallery of Art, Mary Beard tells the fascinating story of how images of Roman autocrats have influenced art, culture, and the representation of power for more than 2,000 years.

A comprehensive survey of the work of this most influential Florentine artist and teacher.

For fifty years, Robert Adams has made compelling, provocative, and highly influential photographs that show us the wonder and fragility of the American landscape, its inherent beauty, and the inadequacy of our response to it.

Volume 5 explores issues associated with the conservation and technical analysis of modern and contemporary art.

In the summer of 1971, while rebounding from the punishing critical response to the debut of his recent figurative work, Philip Guston began drawing the object of his political angst and despair-Richard Nixon, transformed into the character "Poor Richard."

Accompanying the National Gallery of Art exhibition Philip Guston Now, this fully illustrated catalog presents a sweeping retrospective of Philip Guston’s influential work, from Depression-era muralist to abstract expressionist to tragicomic contemporary master.

Accompanying the National Gallery of Art exhibition The New Woman Behind the Camera, this groundbreaking, richly illustrated book looks at those "new women" who embraced the camera as a mode of expression and made a profound impact on the medium from the 1920s to the 1950s. Thematic chapters explore how diverse women emerged as a driving force in modern photography, bringing multiple perspectives to artistic experimentation, studio portraiture, fashion and advertising work, scenes of urban life, ethnography, and photojournalism.

For more than two decades, Lee and Juliet Folger have worked closely with the National Gallery of Art to acquire exceptional seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings. Clouds, Ice, and Bounty honors this remarkable group of works and the collaborative relationship that has brought them into the nation’s collection.

Can the reception of a single, widely disseminated book offer a historical road map for a global art history? This is the question posed by the editors of this volume of essays, which charts the enduring response to Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History.

Accompanying the National Gallery of Art exhibition A Superb Baroque: Art in Genoa 1600⁠–1750, this fully illustrated catalog presents the most extensive study of the Genoese baroque in the English language.

Accompanying the National Gallery of Art exhibition The Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan and James McNeill Whistler, this catalog offers a fascinating look at the partnership of artist James McNeill Whistler and his chief model, Joanna Hiffernan, and the iconic works of art resulting from their life together.

Volume 4 examines the complex themes of series, multiples, and replicas with a broad historical purview that spans from the Renaissance to the 20th century.

Accompanying the National Gallery of Art exhibition Alonso Berruguete: First Sculptor of Renaissance Spain, this catalog offers the first comprehensive account in English of preeminent sculptor Alonso Berruguete (c. 1488–1561).

A sweeping exploration of animals in Japanese art and culture across sixteen centuries.

An illuminating look at how the Pre-Raphaelite movement was embraced by a group of vanguard American artists.

Accompanying the National Gallery of Art exhibition Michel Sittow: Estonian Painter at the Courts of Renaissance Europe, this handsome catalog explores the life and work of a little-known, immensely talented early Renaissance painter from Estonia.

Accompanying the National Gallery of Art exhibition Sharing Images: Renaissance Prints into Maiolica and Bronze, this catalog is the first full-length study into the multifarious influence of Renaissance prints on maiolica and bronze.

Considered to be one of the three great painters of 16th-century Venice, along with Titian and Paolo Veronese, Tintoretto is particularly admired for his bold and expressive brushwork, his dramatic treatments of sacred narrative subjects, and his insightful portraits of the Venetian aristocracy.

A new appraisal of intriguing and meditative figural works by one of the 19th century’s great masters of landscape.

A historic first showing outside Japan of Itō Jakuchū's thirty-scroll series Colorful Realm of Living Beings (c. 1757–1766) at the National Gallery of Art was the occasion for this collection of twelve essays that reimagine the concepts of the artist and art-making as they were understood in early modern Japan.

For more than four decades, Sally Mann has made experimental, elegiac, and hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the overarching themes of existence: memory, desire, death, the bonds of family, and nature's magisterial indifference to human endeavor. What unites this broad body of work - including figure studies, landscapes, and architectural views - is that it is all bred of a place, the American South.

Outliers and American Vanguard Art focuses on three periods when the intersection of trained and untrained artists was at its most fertile. It is the first to explore how those key moments—coinciding with times of American social, political, and cultural upheaval—challenged traditional hierarchies and assumptions about creativity, artistic practice, and the role of the artist. With some 250 works by more than 80 schooled and unschooled artists, this exhibition argues for a more diverse and inclusive representation in the cultural arena.

Volume 3 is dedicated to the works of Edgar Degas (1834–1917) in honor of the centenary of his death.

The complex facets of cubism remain relevant subjects in art history today, a century after Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed the revolutionary style. This collection of essays presents new lines of inquiry and accounts of crucial moments in the reception of cubism by curators, artists, and critics.

The first book to focus exclusively on the arresting eastern photographs that helped shape America’s national identity. 

In celebration of the momentous 75th anniversary of the beloved cultural institution, America's National Gallery of Art takes readers on a definitive inside tour through the museum's remarkable history and growth. This volume will be appreciated for generations to come.

Photography Reinvented brings together thirty-five works by eighteen critically acclaimed artists who, through innovative experimentation and visionary conceptual scope, have changed the course of contemporary photography.

Published in celebration of Virginia Dwan’s gift to the Gallery of her extraordinary personal collection, Dwan Gallery explores her remarkable career.

Beginning in 1921, a series of creative breakthroughs led Davis away from figurative painting and toward a more abstract expression of the world he inhabited. Drawing upon his admiration for Cézanne, Léger, Picasso, and Seurat, Davis developed a style that would evolve over the next four decades to become a dominant force in postwar art. 

Reflecting on the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War, this notable book brings together a range of media and perspectives that show how the conflict has been recorded and remembered over time.