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Architectural History of the Renwick Gallery
The Renwick Gallery was built in 1859 to house the American and European art collection of Washington banker and philanthropist William Wilson Corcoran (1798–1888). Corcoran engaged the noted architect James Renwick Jr. (1818–1895), who had earlier designed the Smithsonian's Castle in Washington, D.C., and St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. Renwick modeled the gallery on the French Second Empire style that was popular at the time, inspired by the Louvre's Tuileries addition in Paris.
Completed in 1861, it was the city's first art museum. Shortly thereafter, the Quartermaster General's Corps of the Union Army occupied the building to store records and uniforms, and eventually set up offices for the duration of the Civil War. The building was returned to Corcoran in 1869. He hosted a lavish ball February 20, 1871, to celebrate the building and to raise money for the long-stalled Washington Monument. The event, called "the most magnificent reception ever given in the United States," was attended by President Ulysses S. Grant and included a special balcony for musicians who were accompanied by canaries singing from cages suspended from the ceiling. After extensive renovations, the building finally opened as his art gallery in 1873.
By 1897, Corcoran's collection had outgrown the building. The trustees of the gallery purchased land at 17th Street and New York Avenue N.W. and hired Ernest Flagg of New York to design a new, larger building—the present-day Corcoran Gallery of Art.
The U.S. Court of Claims took over the building in 1899. In need of larger space by the 1950s, the Court of Claims proposed that the historic building be torn down. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy led the effort to save this architectural gem, and in 1965, S. Dillon Ripley, then secretary of the Smithsonian, met with President Lyndon Johnson to request that the gallery be turned over to the Smithsonian. The Renwick was subsequently dedicated "for use as a gallery of art, crafts, and design."
The architectural firm John Carl Warnecke and Associates of San Francisco, in conjunction with Universal Restorations, Inc. of Washington, D.C., was hired to complete extensive exterior restorations. Washington, D.C.-based architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen was hired to lead the interior renovation. The extraordinary Grand Salon—which had been converted into office space for Court of Claims judges—was restored to its original glory. The building, named the Renwick Gallery in honor of its architect, reopened in 1972 as the home of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's contemporary craft program.
In 2000, the refurbishment of the building's Grand Salon, a 4,300-square-foot gallery with a soaring 40-foot ceiling, included a state-of-the art lighting system that re-creates natural light through innovative treatments of the historic laylight (a skylight unexposed to the outside), custom-made draperies, and gilding of frieze elements. Today, it is considered one of Washington, D.C.'s premier spaces. Paintings from the collection are hung salon-style, top-to-bottom and side-by-side, on its rose-colored walls, recreating the elegant setting of a nineteenth-century collector's picture gallery.