The National Academy of Design is a three-part institution, encompassing a museum, a school of fine arts, and an honorary association of artists. Founded in 1825 by such leading artists as Samuel F. B. Morse, Asher B. Durand, and Thomas Cole to "promote the fine arts in America through instruction and exhibition," the Academy continues to play a critical role in preserving and fostering the visual arts.

The Academy houses one of the largest public collections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art in the country. It comprises over five thousand works in almost every artistic style of the past two centuries, from the linear portraiture of the Federal period and the naturalistic landscapes of the Hudson River School to studies of light and atmosphere that inform Tonalism and American Impressionism; from the gritty realism of the Ashcan movement to the modernist movements of Fauvism, abstraction, and photo- and magic-realism. Masterworks in these and other styles have come into the Academy's collection mainly as gifts from newly elected National Academicians in compliance with membership requirements; thereby continually enriching the collection.