The gallery's origins reach back to the 1930s, when colonial officials first discussed the idea of a national art institution. The Second World War shelved those plans, but in 1943 Sir James McDonald -- a friend and colleague of Cecil John Rhodes -- left a bequest of 30,000 pounds "in trust for the people of the colony" to establish an art gallery and museum in Salisbury. The money was not nearly enough. The Inaugural Board, chaired by the Governor of Southern Rhodesia, launched an appeal to local businesses to raise the additional 150,000 pounds needed for the building. Sir Stephen Courtauld, a member of the British textile dynasty, chaired the Board of Trustees and became the gallery's most passionate advocate. "In all great countries of the world art galleries have their place in the cultural life of the community," he wrote in the 1954 annual report, making the case for a cultural institution in a colony still finding its identity.

The gallery's first director, Frank McEwen, was a British art expert who had spent years in Paris and knew Picasso and Braque. He brought something unexpected to Salisbury: a genuine belief that African artists could produce work of international significance. In the workshop school he established at the gallery, McEwen encouraged local artists to work in stone -- particularly the serpentine and springstone found abundantly in the Zimbabwean countryside. The results astonished the art world. Shona sculpture, as the movement came to be known, combined modernist abstraction with spiritual themes drawn from Shona cosmology. Artists like Nicholas Mukomberanwa, Henry Munyaradzi, and Joram Mariga gained international recognition. McEwen's workshop became a creative incubator, producing work that was exhibited in London, Paris, and New York, and establishing Zimbabwe's reputation as one of Africa's most significant centers of contemporary art.

The transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe in 1980 transformed the gallery's mission. No longer a colonial showpiece, it became a vehicle for post-independence cultural identity. The permanent collection expanded to encompass not just European and Western art but a growing body of Zimbabwean work -- paintings, textiles, and above all sculpture. Queen Elizabeth II visited the gallery in October 1991 for the sixth Zimbabwe Heritage Exhibition, a moment that underscored how thoroughly the institution had evolved. Under successive directors, the gallery maintained its commitment to local artists while navigating the political and economic turbulence that defined Zimbabwe's post-independence decades. The current executive director, Raphael Chikukwa, continues that balancing act.

The National Gallery is not confined to Harare. A branch opened in Bulawayo in 1970, Zimbabwe's second city, initially housed in an old market building behind City Hall. Since 1993 it has occupied Douslin House on Main Street, an elegant two-story building dating to 1901. The Bulawayo branch has been led by notable figures including the acclaimed Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera, who served as director before her death in 2005. A third branch opened in Mutare in 1999, housed in Kopje House -- built in 1897 as the city's first hospital and later declared a national monument. With just five staff members, the Mutare gallery runs an annual exhibition program that mixes selections from the Harare collection with work by local artists, extending the institution's reach into Zimbabwe's eastern highlands.