Its death sentence came down in a public courtroom, but the priceless estate of the Corcoran Gallery of Art is being divvied up under a cloak of secrecy.

Museum-goers who grew up with Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of George Washington and George Inness’s landscapes don’t know if these and other treasures from the city’s oldest private museum will hang on the walls of the National Gallery of Art or at one of the Smithsonian museums — or if they will be consigned to a storage facility.