THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART 
11 
fine arts, and particular attention is being given to paintings 
and sculpture. The former have composed most of the recent 
donations, and it is this class of objects especially which has 
made it necessary to seek new and appropriate quarters. A 
committee representative of the higher art associations of the 
country has been designated as censors of the gallery and it is 
expected through their cooperation to maintain this department 
on a dignified and satisfactory basis. 
For the initial steps toward the creation of a national gallery 
of art credit must be given to the National Institute, whose 
name is now scarcely remembered, though its short life was 
historically important and its activities were fruitful in both a 
material and educational way. Organized in Washington in 
1 840 and two years later incorporated by Congress for a period 
of twenty years, nominally for the promotion of science, it estab- 
lished a department of literature and art, and accumulated a 
museum of considerable size, located in the Patent Office build- 
ing, in which the collections of the Government made prior 
to 1850 were also deposited. Both its constitution and its 
charter provided that upon the dissolution of the society its 
collections should become the property of the United States. 
While the number of art objects in the museum of the Insti- 
tute was not great, it included examples of the work of several 
prominent artists, all of which, with the exception of a few 
loans, should now be in the possession of the National Museum, 
but the location of some of them remains to be ascertained. 
Of portraits in oil there were seventeen, including Washington 
by the elder Peale; Guizot, Tyler, and Preston by Healy; Cap- 
tain Evans by Copley; Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and 
Monroe by Gilbert Stuart; one of Jackson by Sully and another 
by R. E. W. Earl, and Corwin by J. M. Stanley. Among 
paintings of miscellaneous subjects, numbering at least ten, may 
be mentioned: Job and his Comforters, by Spagnoletto; Cattle 
Piece with Peasants, by Nicolas Berghem; General Marion giv- 
ing dinner to a British Officer, by Lieut. Henry C. Flagg, U. S. 
Navy; a View of Constantinople purchased from the collection 
of Cardinal Fesch in Rome; and a figure subject of Italian 
origin, evidently of some merit. The notable collection of 
Indian portraits and scenes, painted for the Government by 
