L'Enfant Gallery

The building at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and P Street NW has the proportions of another era. It is three stories of Italianate brick, with tall arched windows and a corner entrance that funnels foot traffic from both streets. Inside, the ceilings climb high enough that ten-foot display cases look appropriately scaled. Furniture and sculpture crowd the perimeter. On a Saturday afternoon in Georgetown, tourists slow their stride when they pass; people who know the place walk straight in. The storefront was boarded up when Peter Colasante took it over in 2000. It had been an Italian men’s clothing shop before that. He saw what it could hold.

Colasante grew up in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, and came to Washington to study at Catholic University, where he tried philosophy and then acting and did not distinguish himself in either. What changed his course was a job cataloguing for Fred Maloof, a wealthy Lebanese collector in Oxon Hill, Maryland, whose holdings drew a steady procession of dealers and buyers and, eventually, federal investigators. Colasante emerged from that education with a single guiding principle his mentor had instilled: never specialize. He has followed it for more than fifty years.

The gallery currently holds more than four thousand oil paintings, which Colasante sells at a rate of two hundred to three hundred a year. The inventory beyond the paintings takes four floors to contain, including a basement fitted out as a Victorian parlor. Chinese art and Asian ceramics fill one section; Civil War artifacts, antique furniture, chandeliers, silver, and sculpture from seventeen or more countries fill others. Dealers from around the country call the gallery specifically for Asian ceramics. A neoclassical sculpture attributed to Antonio Canova, titled Hebe, from around 1800 and once part of the Vanderbilt collection, occupies a place of particular prominence. Colasante spotted it in a New York window decades before he acquired it.

The gallery became L’Enfant Gallery in 1990, named for Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the architect who laid out the original street plan of Washington. The move to Wisconsin and P came a decade later. Programming has grown alongside the collection. The Counterpoint Concerts series brings classical musicians into the gallery space. The L’Enfant Lecture Series covers topics ranging from AI warfare to American folklore. The monthly Cocktail in the Window event pairs a house mixologist with live musicians and turns the corner storefront into a public performance visible from the sidewalk. Past exhibitions have included a Wall of Women show and a Polite Society Salon. Colasante runs all of it without a computer.

The gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday, ten to six, and closed Monday and Tuesday. Phone ahead at (202) 625-2873 before making a dedicated trip, since hours can occasionally vary. Parking along Wisconsin and P is workable on weekday mornings; weekend afternoons on the corridor are tighter. The Dupont Circle Metro stop is about six blocks east along P Street. Appraisals and consulting are available by arrangement. On a first visit, go downstairs.