On January 19, 1874, the Corcoran Gallery of Art opened to the public in Washington, D.C., in the Pennsylvania Avenue building now known as the Renwick Gallery. Built to house William Wilson Corcoran's collection of American and European art, the structure was designed by James Renwick Jr. and promoted in its own time as an American answer to the Louvre. The opening matters because it gave the capital one of its earliest purpose-built public art museums and established a civic model for displaying private collections as public culture. The gallery soon outgrew the building, moved in 1897, and left behind a structure later reclaimed by the Smithsonian for American craft and decorative arts.
It helped establish Washington, D.C., as a public art-museum city before the National Gallery era.