The National Academy is an honorary association of American artists with a museum and a school of fine arts. Founded in 1825 as the National Academy of Design 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. Through a program of exceptional exhibitions in the Museum and quality instruction in the School of Fine Arts, the Academy serves as a link to the art of our past and a bridge to that of the future.

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.