From its founding in 1880 the National Gallery of Canada has grown to become the largest visual arts museum in the country. 

The Gallery's outstanding holdings of Canadian art are the direct result of its unwavering commitment to the acquisition of works by living Canadian artists, a commitment that can be traced back virtually to the foundation year of the institution. By now our collection of contemporary art is truly international.

The collections of historical European art at the National Gallery of Canada are of the same elevated quality, in prints and drawings as well as in paintings and sculpture.  By North American standards, the Gallery has been actively acquiring European treasures in particular for a relatively long time, which accounts in part for the strength of our holdings. Another significant development in our history came in the late 1960s when the Gallery began made a concerted effort to collect contemporary American art.

A collection dedicated to Photography was established in 1967, making the Gallery the first museum in Canada to systematically collect photographs as fine art. In 1985 the National Film Board's Still Photography Division was transferred to the National Gallery as an affiliate museum, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, whose mandate is to collect and exhibit the work of contemporary Canadian photographers.
The Gallery's Inuit art collection encompasses the major creative and historical developments of the period since the 1940s and now forms part of a new department of Indigenous art that is concentrated on the collecting of Aboriginal contemporary art.   

The mandate of the National Gallery of Canada clearly states that “the collections are its principal assets.”  This site featuring overviews of the different collecting areas and images of some of the pre-eminent objects in our collection bears witness to our passionate belief in these words.