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Located a block south from the White House, the Corcoran Gallery of Art houses a collection of more than 12,000 works, which are displayed in a building deemed one of the finest examples of Beaux Arts architecture in Washington. Founded in 1869 and completed in 1897, the Corcoran building was the city’s first public building to be designed as such and was Washington’s first art museum. It is one of the three oldest museums in the United States, ranking with Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Corcoran building is actually the second home for the artworks collected by William Wilson Corcoran (1798-1888), as the collection was first housed in a building at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, known today as the Renwick Gallery.