Guarisco Gallery

Guarisco Gallery at 2828 Pennsylvania Avenue NW is a fine art gallery specializing in nineteenth and early twentieth century American and European paintings, serving the Georgetown collector market with the art historical period that bridges the antique market and the contemporary art market. The Pennsylvania Avenue gallery address places Guarisco adjacent to the DTR Modern Galleries at 2820, creating a Pennsylvania Avenue gallery cluster that covers the range from the historical painting to the contemporary work.

Nineteenth-century American painting is a category with specific relevance to the Georgetown market: the Hudson River School, the Luminists, the Tonalists, and the American Impressionists who constitute the American painting tradition of the century produced work that documents the American landscape and the American experience in the period of the country’s greatest territorial expansion and cultural self-definition. The collector who acquires American nineteenth-century painting is acquiring a piece of the national visual record alongside the aesthetic pleasure of the work itself.

The European paintings of the same period, which the Guarisco program includes alongside the American work, cover the Barbizon School of French landscape painting, the academic paintings of the Paris Salon, and the early Impressionist tradition that transformed European painting in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The European academic painting market, which had declined in value through most of the twentieth century as the taste for the Impressionist tradition grew, has recovered significantly as the historical distance from the period has allowed a more nuanced appreciation of the academic tradition.

The Pennsylvania Avenue gallery cluster at this address serves the Georgetown collector who values the historical painting market alongside the Washington collector’s traditional strength in the contemporary art market. Hours run Tuesday through Saturday. The nineteenth-century American painting market in Washington has a specific relationship to the city’s museum community: the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Corcoran Gallery’s historical collection have established the Washington collector’s familiarity with American historical painting that the Georgetown gallery market builds on. The Georgetown collector who has spent time with the Hudson River School paintings in the Smithsonian’s collection has the visual education that the Guarisco Gallery’s inventory rewards.

The Guarisco Gallery’s Pennsylvania Avenue location at 2828 clusters the gallery with DTR Modern at 2820 in the gallery complex that Georgetown’s Pennsylvania Avenue block supports near the Four Seasons. The collector who visits Pennsylvania Avenue for the contemporary work at DTR Modern can address the nineteenth-century market at Guarisco in the same afternoon, which makes the Pennsylvania Avenue gallery block a complete art history visit rather than a single period gallery stop. Hours run Tuesday through Saturday. The Guarisco Gallery’s Pennsylvania Avenue location has established it as one of Washington’s most consistent resources for the nineteenth-century American and European painting market. The gallery’s expertise in the provenance and attribution of period paintings reflects the serious collector’s requirement for the historical documentation that distinguishes the investment-grade historical painting from the period decorator piece. Gallery hours run Tuesday through Saturday.