Step past the ATMs and the teller windows at 350 Park Ave. and encounter a pleasant surprise: a bright, 15-foot-square art gallery. This small but elegant exhibition space, open to the public during regular business hours, is Park Avenue Bank’s gift of culture to New York City. Since 2006, the gallery’s “Meet a Museum” program has presented work from an impressive series of institutions, including the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Jewish Museum, and the New-York Historical Society.

The current exhibition features eight handsome portraits from the National Academy Museum, which boasts one of this country’s largest collections of American art. Since 1839, every member of the academy has been obliged to supply it with a sample of their work, and the result is a first-rate collection of work by the likes of Frederic Church, Elihu Vedder, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Richard Diebenkorn, and Wayne Thiebaud.

Paintings by the first two of these artists highlight this snug installation of work ranging between the mid-19th century and the late 1960s. The earliest painting is a c. 1850 portrait of our first president, produced by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1816–68) as a study for his celebrated “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1850). The wall label tells us that this sturdy likeness was actually executed — as were many portraits of Washington — from a sculpture by Jean-Antoine Houdon. Next to it is a very capable portrait from 1858 by Charles Loring Elliott (1812–68); its facility of modeling and expressive likeness show why this student of Trumbull was at mid-century America’s pre-eminent portraitist.

A gem-like canvas (1888–89) by William James Whittemore (1860-1955) adds a twist to the portraiture genre; it depicts one of his colleagues copying a painting in the Louvre. The copied painting is off-screen, while the Hellenistic sculpture “Crouching Aphrodite” dominates the background. The label recounts Whittemore’s difficulty in convincing the guards that his painting conformed to the museum’s copying regulations.

Alongside, a 1922 self-portrait by Boston artist Gertrude Horsford Fiske (1879–1961) shows an earnest realism inflected with Impressionistic touches.

The paintings by the two living artists are the only ones executed in the egg tempera medium favored by pre-Renaissance artists. The windswept background of a c. 1944 self-portrait by Andrew Wyeth (b. 1917) reflects a fairly conventional romantic sensibility. A self-portrait by George Tooker (b. 1920), his hieratic pose modeled in pale, delicate hues, intriguingly updates quattrocento painting.

Paintings by Vedder (1836-1923) and Eakins (1844–1916) provide the most poignant moments. Vedder’s small, almost monochromatic portrait from 1865 of the former slave Jane Jackson touchingly combines the factual and the poetic. The label describes how the artist met his subject selling peanuts on the sidewalk near his studio: “Her meekly bowed head and a look of patient endurance touched my heart and we became friends.” Sentimental, perhaps, but one needn’t read the label to sense all these qualities in the portrait’s eloquent and sensitive modeling. Eakins’s 1902 self-portrait, produced during the time his reputation was recovering from professional scandals, is the very image of anxious resolve. At once wholly engaged and pitilessly analytic, it brims with faith in painting’s powers to capture the unadorned world.

A postmodernist would point out that all these works reflect to a considerable extent the long shadow of European traditions. None of them strictly typifies the American strains of Social Realism or Regionalism, let alone the radical discoveries of the New York School. And from another point of view — of less interest, perhaps, to postmodernists — none of them quite matches, in sheer plastic force, the momentous rhythms of the French master of Realism, Gustave Courbet. (Elliott’s portrait, in particular, recalls Courbet’s style while falling short of his pictorial energy — a phenomenon that will be spectacularly on view in the Metropolitan Museum’s upcoming Courbet exhibition.) All these paintings, however, offer other poignant qualities, not least of them a distinctly American confidence in the value of practical means and frank speaking. Together they provide a most welcome oasis of art on Park Avenue.

Until February 8 (350 Park Ave. between 51st and 52nd streets, 212-220-0878).