Mitchell Rales, co-founder of the Danaher Corporation and president of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has donated $1.9 billion to the Glenstone Foundation, which operates the Glenstone Museum, in Potomac, Maryland, Bloomberg News reports.

The donation from Rales—who with his wife, Emily Wei Rales, joined the Giving Pledge in 2019—was disclosed in the foundation’s 2021 IRS tax filing, and brings the foundation’s assets to $4.6 billion, putting its endowment on par with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The contribution has few precedents in philanthropy and dwarfs the $200 million gift to the Smithsonian Institution made by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2021. According to Bloomberg, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, founded by the bequest of J. Paul Getty, is considered to have the largest museum endowment in the world, topping $8.6 billion as of June 2022.

The foundation funds the museum—founded in 2006 and curated by Rales’ wife—which exhibits more than 1,300 works of art created since 1945, including pieces by Cy Twombly, Robert Gober, Charles Ray, and Brice Marden as well as a 230-acre sculpture park. In June 2022, the museum opened a purpose-built gallery to house the sculpture Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure by Richard Serra. In addition, the foundation has made multimillion-dollar gifts to other institutions including the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Triple Aught Foundation, which supports the land-art sculpture City created by Michael Heizer in the Nevada desert, Bloomberg reports.

“An endowment like that means this museum can exist in perpetuity,” Masterworks executive vice president Evan Beard told Bloomberg. “The impulse to preserve the legacy of a collector has led to the foundation of so many great museums….[The Raleses are] a pillar of the Washington art landscape. They’re definitely at the top of the totem pole, collector-wise.”

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