8 Must-See Paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Held lightly between a woman’s slim fingers, a delicate balance forms the central focus of this painting. Behind the woman hangs a painting of Christ’s Last Judgment. Here, Johannes Vermeer uses symbolism so that he can tell a lofty story through an ordinary scene. Woman Holding a Balance employs a carefully planned composition to express one of Vermeer’s major preoccupations—finding life’s underlying balance. The central vanishing point of the painting occurs at the woman’s fingertips. On the table before her lie earthly treasures—pearls and a gold chain. Behind her, Christ passes judgment on humanity. There is a mirror on the wall, a common symbol of vanity or worldliness, while a soft light raking across the picture sounds a spiritual note. The serene, Madonna-like woman stands in the center, calmly weighing transitory worldly concerns against spiritual ones. (Ann Kay)

The perfectly poised and polished composition with its wash of vibrant surfaces tell of an artist totally at ease with his subject matter. Gilbert Stuart was primarily a painter of head and shoulders, so his full-length skater was something of a rarity. Painted in Edinburgh, this eye-catching picture by Stuart of his friend William Grant combines cool colors with flawless portraiture. As with many of his paintings, Stuart works up from a dark mass, in this case the ice, which provides a solid foundation for the skater. The figure rises above the ice with tilting hat, crossed arms, and an almost jaunty face, in dark clothes that provide a contrast to the background whites and grays. From the age of 14, Stuart was already painting on commission in colonial America. In 1776 he sought refuge in London during the American War of Independence. There he studied with Benjamin West, the visual chronicler of early U.S. colonial history. It was West who aptly described Stuart’s skill for “nailing a face to the canvas.” For his ability to capture a sitter’s essence, Stuart was regarded by his London peers as second only to Sir Joshua Reynolds; he was far above his American contemporaries—with the exception of Bostonian John Singleton Copley. But finances were not Stuart’s forté, and he was forced to flee to Ireland in 1787 to escape creditors. Returning to America in the 1790s, Stuart quickly established himself as the country’s leading portraitist, not least with his paintings of five U.S. presidents. (James Harrison)

In this bewitching portrait, Thomas Gainsborough captured a compelling likeness of the sitter while also creating an air of melancholy. This emphasis on mood was rare in the portraiture of the day, but it became an important concern for the Romantics in the following century. Gainsborough had known the sitter since she was a child and had painted her, together with her sister, when he was living in Bath (The Linley Sisters, 1772). He was a close friend of the family, largely because they shared his passion for music. Indeed, Elizabeth was a talented soprano and had performed as a soloist at the celebrated Three Choirs Festival. She had been obliged to abandon her singing career, however, after eloping with Richard Brinsley Sheridan—then a penniless actor. Sheridan went on to achieve considerable success, both as a playwright and as a politician, but his private life suffered in the process. He ran up huge gambling debts and was repeatedly unfaithful to his wife. This may account for Elizabeth’s wistful and somewhat forlorn appearance in this picture. One of Gainsborough’s greatest assets was his ability to orchestrate the various elements of a picture into a satisfying whole. In all too many portraits, the sitter resembles a cardboard cut-out placed against a landscape background. Here, the artist has paid as much attention to the sumptuous pastoral setting as to his glamorous model, and he has ensured that the breeze, which is making the branches bend and sway, is also stirring the gauze drapery around Elizabeth’s neck. (Iain Zaczek)

René Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, he worked in a wallpaper factory and was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926. Magritte settled in Paris at the end of the 1920s, where he met members of the Surrealist movement, and he soon became one of the most significant artists of the group. He returned to Brussels a few years later and opened an advertising agency. Magritte’s fame was secured in 1936, after his first exhibition in New York. Since then, New York has been the location of two of his most important retrospective shows—at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992. La Condition Humaine is one of many versions Magritte painted on the same theme. The picture is emblematic of the work he produced in Paris during the 1930s, when he was still under the spell of the Surrealists. Here, Magritte executes a kind of optical illusion. He depicts an actual painting of a landscape displayed in front of an open window. He makes the image on the painted picture match perfectly with the “true” landscape outdoors. In doing so, Magritte proposed, in one unique image, the association between nature and its representation through the means of art. This work also stands as an assertion of the artist’s power to reproduce nature at will and proves how ambiguous and impalpable the border between exterior and interior, objectivity and subjectivity, and reality and imagination can be. (Steven Pulimood)

Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, known as Giorgione, commanded enormous respect and influence given that his productive period lasted only 15 years. Very little is known about him, although it is believed that he was familiar with Leonardo da Vinci’s art. He began his training in the workshop of Giovanni Bellini in Venice, and he would later claim both Sebastiano del Piombo and Titian as his pupils. Giorgio Vasari wrote that Titian was the best imitator of the Giorgionesque style, a connection that made their styles difficult to differentiate. Giorgione perished from the plague in his early 30s, and his posthumous fame was immediate. Adoration of the Shepherds, otherwise known as the Allendale Nativity from the name of its 19th-century English owners, is among the finest renderings of High Renaissance Nativities. It is also widely regarded as one of the most solidly attributed Giorgiones in the world. (There is discussion, however, that the angels’ heads have been painted over by an unknown hand.) The Venetian blond tonality of the sky and the large and enveloping bucolic atmosphere differentiate this Nativity. The holy family receive the shepherds at the mouth of a dark cave; they are seen in the light because the Christ child has brought light into the world. Christ’s mother Mary is clad in resplendent blue-and-red drapery in keeping with tradition: blue to signify the divine, and red signifying her own humanity. (Steven Pulimood)

This painting belongs to the period when Jan Vermeer produced the tranquil interior scenes for which he is famed. For such a small painting, Girl with the Red Hat has great visual impact. Like his Girl with a Pearl Earring, a girl with sensuously parted lips looks over her shoulder at the viewer while highlights glint off her face and earrings. Here, however, the girl looms larger, placed in the foreground of the picture, confronting us more directly. Her extravagant red hat and luxuriant blue wrap are flamboyant for Vermeer. In contrasting the vibrant colors with a muted, patterned backdrop he increases the girl’s prominence and creates a forceful theatricality. Vermeer employed painstaking techniques—opaque layers, thin glazes, wet-in-wet blending, and points of color—that help to explain why his output was low and why both scholars and the public find him endlessly fascinating. (Ann Kay)

Jackson Pollock is a 20th-century cultural icon. After studying at the Art Students’ League in 1929 under Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, he became influenced by the work of the Mexican Social Realist muralists. He studied at David Alfaro Siqueiros’s experimental workshop in New York, where he began painting with enamel. He later used commercial enamel house paint in his work, claiming it allowed him greater fluidity. By the late 1940s Pollock had developed the “drip and splash” method, which some critics claim was influenced by the automatism of the Surrealists. Abandoning a paintbrush and easel, Pollock worked on a canvas laid out on the floor, using sticks, knives, and other implements to fling, dribble, or manipulate the paint from every aspect of the canvas, while building up layer-upon-layer of color. Sometimes he introduced other materials, such as sand and glass, to create different textures. Number 1, 1950 helped cement Pollock’s reputation as a groundbreaking artist. It is a mixture of long black-and-white strokes and arcs, short, sharp drips, spattered lines, and thick blotches of enamel paint and it manages to combine physical action with a soft and airy feel. Pollock’s friend, art critic Clement Greenberg, suggested the title Lavender Mist to reflect the painting’s atmospheric tone, even though no lavender was used in the work: it is composed primarily of white, blue, yellow, gray, umber, rosy pink, and black paint. (Aruna Vasudevan)

Saint John in the Desert is part of an altarpiece painted for the Church of Santa Lucia dei Magnoli, in Florence. This is the masterwork of one of the leading artists of the early Italian Renaissance, Domenico Veneziano. Here is art at a crossroads, mixing medieval and emerging Renaissance styles with a new appreciation of light, color, and space. The name Veneziano suggests that Domenico came from Venice, but he spent most of his days in Florence and was one of the founders of the 15th-century school of Florentine painting. John is seen exchanging his normal clothes for a rough camel-hair coat—exchanging a worldly life for an ascetic one. Veneziano departed from the medieval norm of depicting John as an older, bearded hermit and instead displays a young man cast, literally, in the mold of ancient sculpture. Classical art became a major influence on the Renaissance, and this is one of the first examples. The landscape’s powerful, nonrealistic shapes symbolize the harsh surroundings in which John has chosen to pursue his pious path and recall scenes from Gothic medieval art; in fact, the artist trained initially in the Gothic style and very probably studied the northern European artists. What is also remarkable about this painting is its clear, open delicacy and its attention to atmospheric light effects. The space has been carefully organized, but Veneziano in large part uses his revolutionary light, fresh colors (achieved in part by adding extra oil to his tempera) to indicate perspective, rather than the lines of the composition, and in this he was a pioneer. (Ann Kay)