The American Art staff at the Corcoran Gallery of Art is currently working on an authoritative catalogue of the museum’s renowned collection of pre-1945 paintings and sculpture.

The Corcoran’s American art collection includes a remarkable number of iconic works in all genres from the mid-18th to the mid-20th century, while boasting outstanding breadth and depth in Hudson River School painting, 19th-century portraiture and genre painting, Impressionism, and early 20th-century realism. Highlights of the collection include:

• Samuel F. B. Morse, The House of Representatives, 1822
• Rembrandt Peale, Washington before Yorktown, 1824–1825
• Thomas Cole, The Departure, 1837
• Thomas Cole, The Return, 1837
• Hiram Powers, The Greek Slave, 1846
• Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara, 1857
• John Singer Sargent, Marie Buloz Pailleron (Madame Édouard Pailleron), 1879
• Thomas Eakins, Singing a Pathetic Song, 1881
• Albert Bierstadt, The Last of the Buffalo , c. 1889
• George Bellows, Forty-two Kids, 1907
• Aaron Douglas, Into Bondage, 1936
• Edward Hopper, Ground Swell, 1939

To maximize accessibility, the Corcoran’s Pre-1945 American Paintings and Sculpture Collection Catalogue will comprise both a traditional book-format publication and an innovative online component. The book will feature essays written by noted American art scholars on 100 of the most important paintings in the collection, which comprises, in total, almost 900 paintings and sculptures. These essays will be accompanied by color plates and black-and-white comparative illustrations. The balance of the collection will be documented with black-and-white illustrations and basic identifying information (artist, title, date, medium, accession number, and credit line). The introduction to the book, authored by Bechhoefer Curator of American Art Sarah Cash, will offer an in-depth and contextual study of William Wilson Corcoran’s role as an important early collector of American art. Appendices to the print publication will list all of the works in W. W. Corcoran’s original collection and those works exhibited in the Gallery’s prestigious Annual and Biennial exhibitions.

The online catalogue—the Corcoran’s first such undertaking—will be of particular use to scholars. This electronic resource will provide curatorial data and images for every work in the collection. It will also feature comprehensive listings of inscriptions, technical notes, provenance, exhibition history, references, and related works for each of the 100 paintings featured in the print publication.

View a sample catalogue entry
• Joshua Johnson's Grace Allison McCurdy (Mrs. Hugh McCurdy) and Her Daughters, Mary Jane and Letitia Grace c. 1806
• Charles Frederic Ulrich In the Land of Promise, Castle Garden 1884
• Emil Carlsen The Picture from Thibet c. 1920
• Yasuo Kuniyoshi Cows in Pasture 1923

The Corcoran extends its thanks to the following donors for their support of the research phase of the Pre-1945 American Paintings and Sculpture Collection Catalogue: Furthermore: a publication program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund; The Getty Foundation; The Henry Luce Foundation; The Page & Otto Marx, Jr. Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; The Women’s Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art; and a number of anonymous individual donors.

Sarah Cash, Project Director
Bechhoefer Curator of American Art, is the project director.

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