Articles

July 8, 2026

ARTICLE

Seven Artists Inspired by Jazz

Learn how some of your favorite artists found inspiration from jazz music and listen to tunes behind their works.

By Annie Yi

The image features a person with their upper body visible and slightly turned to the side. Their face is tilted upwards, and their mouth is open wide, displaying their teeth. The person's facial features are partially obscured due to low light. Their hair is short, and they are wearing earrings. They are dressed in a dark halter-top that reveals their shoulders, and they have a pendant necklace. The rest of the image is dark with little visible detail.

June 12, 2026

INTERACTIVE ARTICLE

Childe Hassam and the Flag in American Art

Explore the American impressionist's paintings of the US flag.

By Alexandra Dean

We look beyond a cluster of flags hanging from the side of one tall building onto a wide street at a row of buildings across from us in this vertical painting. The scene is loosely painted with visible brushstrokes, so some details are difficult to make out. We seem to lean out a window to look along the street, so the building to our right only skims the edge of the composition and continues off the top. The three flags closest to us fly from nearly horizontal flagstaffs along the bottom edge of the painting. All the flags are in shades of scarlet red, white, and royal blue. The flag closest to us is red with the red, white, and blue Union Jack in the upper corner. Beyond it is an American flag with 49 stars, and then the French flag with the vertical bands of blue, white, and red. Those three flags are repeated about a dozen times along the building that stretches away from us, along the right edge of the painting. More of those flags are hung from the cream-white and tan buildings across the street, to our left. Some of those buildings reach off the top edge of the canvas and others come close. The shadows along moldings and the windows are painted with pale and lapis blue. Through narrow gaps left between the fluttering flags, vertical strokes of navy blue and violet purple suggest crowds of people in the street below. The sky between the buildings is ice blue. The artist signed and dated the painting in the center left, “Childe Hassam May 17 1917.”

June 8, 2026

ARTICLE

How I Made This: Megan O’Cain’s “Mound of Butter” Fever Dream Ruffle Dress

Open Call finalist Megan O’Cain explains how a 19th-century portrait of butter stopped her in her tracks—and how she spun it into a whimsical maximalist dress.

By Annie Yi

A collage of two photos. On the left, Megan O'Cain drafts her concept for her butter dress. On the right, Megan poses a model wearing the butter dress and reclining on a grassy lawn.

June 4, 2026

INTERACTIVE ARTICLE

The Most Famous Sculpture of the 19th Century

This marble sculpture symbolizes everything from the Greek War of Independence to the fight for emancipation in America.

By Alex Dean

May 20, 2026

ARTICLE

Your Guide to Summer at the National Gallery

Our nine tips for bringing art, music, and joy to your summer.

May 13, 2026

INTERACTIVE ARTICLE

The Feminine Enigma of Cecilia Beaux’s Sita and Sarita

It’s just a picture of a woman and her cat—or is it?

By Annie Yi

A woman with pale skin and dressed in white sits on a couch gazing into the distance to our left as she raises one arm to stroke a black cat perched on her shoulder in this vertical portrait. Shown from the lap up, the woman’s dress has voluminous, puffed, elbow-length sleeves and a high collar, and her narrow waist is cinched with a white sash. Her dark brown hair is parted down the middle and tied back, and she has pale blue eyes and pink lips. She reaches up to the cat with her left hand, on our right, and her other hand, farther from us, rests flat in her lap. The black cat looks at us with greenish-yellow eyes as it almost disappears into the dark brown background above the white couch, which is decorated with a blue pattern. The artist signed the work with dark letters in the lower left corner: “Cecilia Beaux.”

May 6, 2026

ARTICLE

The Ghost Army’s Artists at War

Learn how artists like Ellsworth Kelly fooled the Nazis with inflatable tanks and painted shadows.

By Abby Whitlock

Four Allied soldiers lift one of the dummy tanks used in Operation Viersen

April 17, 2026

ARTICLE

Artistic Visions of Our Nation’s Nature

See how artists interpret our nation’s natural beauty—from a fluttering Baltimore oriole to a towering redwood tree.

By Alex Dean

The top three-quarters of this horizontal landscape painting is filled with roiling, deeply shadowed clouds that tower over a line of buffalo crossing a grassy meadow below. Small in scale, the buffalo form a line that extends away from us at a diagonal into the distance to our right. Sunlight creates a bright reflection on the stream where the frontmost buffalo crosses, but the other animals are nearly backlit in the raking light. Trees, with branches whipping in the wind, rise along the left side of the painting, and the mountainous landscape to our right is lost in darkness under heavy clouds. The clouds above lighten from navy blue in the lower right corner of the sky to slate blue and white at the center of the painting. Small patches of blue sky are visible between a few breaks in the clouds, and sunlight falls on a cliff-like mountain face in the distance beyond the trees to our left. Another bank of parchment-colored clouds in the upper left corner, closer to us, contrasts with the glimmering light highlighting some of the clouds nearby.

April 2, 2026

ARTICLE

Who Is Elizabeth Gilbert Jerome? 5 Things to Know

The Hudson River School painter created landscapes that captured America’s natural splendor.

By Angelica Hankins

The painting features a valley with purple and brown mountains in the distance, surrounding a reflective body of water with a small rowboat floating on it. Closer to us, there are gray rocks, brown tree trunks and branches, and lush green vegetation at the edge of the water. The sky above is painted in warm shades of yellow, peach, and orange, which transition to pale greenish-blue at the top. The water below reflects these colors, as well as those of the distant mountain and surrounding trees.

March 19, 2026

INTERACTIVE ARTICLE

The Exceptional Emotion of Artemisia Gentileschi’s "Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy"

One of the Italian baroque painter’s finest works recently joined our collection.

Seven Artists Inspired by Jazz

Childe Hassam and the Flag in American Art

How I Made This: Megan O’Cain’s “Mound of Butter” Fever Dream Ruffle Dress

The Most Famous Sculpture of the 19th Century

Your Guide to Summer at the National Gallery

The Feminine Enigma of Cecilia Beaux’s Sita and Sarita

The Ghost Army’s Artists at War

Artistic Visions of Our Nation’s Nature

Who Is Elizabeth Gilbert Jerome? 5 Things to Know

The Exceptional Emotion of Artemisia Gentileschi’s "Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy"

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