L’Enfant Gallery

1442 Wisconsin Ave. NW
202/625-2873
www.lenfantmoderne.com [1]

On a recent visit to L’Enfant Gallery, two tiny sketches hung cockeyed on a wall amid huge oil paintings and just above another set of prints and paintings stacked against the wall. Just getting a close look was an exercise in contortion—one slip and the viewer would bump into an antique dresser or knock over another pile of paintings.

But yes, on close inspection, they were Picassos, and they weren’t cheap. But there they were, for sale amid the thousands of paintings stuffed into three floors of a cramped corner row house in Georgetown.

L’Enfant Gallery has the feel of a thrift shop but the quality of a fine gallery. The prices aren’t at all thrift-store (the owners definitely know the value of a Picasso or of students of Canaletto), but the experience of the hunt is.