The National Gallery has made its first ever acquisition of a painting by an American artist.

George Bellows’ 1912 painting, ”Men of the Docks”, depicts a group of workers standing by the waterfront in Brooklyn.

The London museum paid $25.5 million for the artwork, which was previously owned by Randolph College in Virginia.

It marks a major shift in the gallery’s collecting policy, previously limited to paintings by European artists from the Renaissance to around 1900.