Description
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Met, is the largest art museum in the Americas: a vast building on Fifth Avenue, at the edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, with some 1.5 million works from ancient Egypt to the present day. It is best explored by choosing a few galleries.
The favorite is the Temple of Dendur, a sandstone temple from Nubia, rebuilt beside a reflecting pool under a wall of windows. The Egyptian galleries around it also hold miniature wooden models of daily life and "William," a small blue faience hippo that became the museum's unofficial mascot.
For painting, head to the 19th-century galleries, with Monet, Manet, Degas, Cézanne and a fine group of Van Goghs. Elsewhere, the Greek and Roman galleries include a whole bedroom from a villa at Boscoreale, buried by Vesuvius. The Arms and Armor galleries are among the most popular in the museum.
The Met opened in 1872 with a Roman sarcophagus and 174 paintings bought from European dealers. Nearly two-thirds of those paintings were later sold off. What came after them fills a building almost a quarter of a mile long.
The founders, businessmen and artists, among them the father of President Theodore Roosevelt, wanted a museum to educate the American people. In 1880 it moved into a red-brick building by Calvert Vaux, inside Central Park. Then it never stopped growing.
Today it is a patchwork of more than twenty buildings, most of them invisible from the street, behind the grand Beaux-Arts facade on Fifth Avenue. The collection grew with the gifts of bankers and heirs.
The Havemeyers left their Impressionists, strongest of all in Degas. Robert Lehman gave nearly 3,000 works. John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded the Cloisters, a museum of medieval art in northern Manhattan built with pieces of French cloisters.
Some gifts were buildings. In 1965 Egypt gave the United States the Temple of Dendur, saved from the waters of the Aswan High Dam. Since 1978 it has stood in its own glass hall, facing Central Park.
Don't miss
• The Temple of Dendur.
• The Egyptian galleries.
• The 19th-century galleries.
• The Arms and Armor galleries.
• The Astor Court.
Did you know?
• The Astor Court is a Ming-style garden court modeled on one in Suzhou.
• The Met is said to have opened the world's first museum shop, in 1908.
• Every year the medieval hall, with its high arched ceiling, becomes home to the museum's elaborately decorated Christmas tree.
The favorite is the Temple of Dendur, a sandstone temple from Nubia, rebuilt beside a reflecting pool under a wall of windows. The Egyptian galleries around it also hold miniature wooden models of daily life and "William," a small blue faience hippo that became the museum's unofficial mascot.
For painting, head to the 19th-century galleries, with Monet, Manet, Degas, Cézanne and a fine group of Van Goghs. Elsewhere, the Greek and Roman galleries include a whole bedroom from a villa at Boscoreale, buried by Vesuvius. The Arms and Armor galleries are among the most popular in the museum.
The Met opened in 1872 with a Roman sarcophagus and 174 paintings bought from European dealers. Nearly two-thirds of those paintings were later sold off. What came after them fills a building almost a quarter of a mile long.
The founders, businessmen and artists, among them the father of President Theodore Roosevelt, wanted a museum to educate the American people. In 1880 it moved into a red-brick building by Calvert Vaux, inside Central Park. Then it never stopped growing.
Today it is a patchwork of more than twenty buildings, most of them invisible from the street, behind the grand Beaux-Arts facade on Fifth Avenue. The collection grew with the gifts of bankers and heirs.
The Havemeyers left their Impressionists, strongest of all in Degas. Robert Lehman gave nearly 3,000 works. John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded the Cloisters, a museum of medieval art in northern Manhattan built with pieces of French cloisters.
Some gifts were buildings. In 1965 Egypt gave the United States the Temple of Dendur, saved from the waters of the Aswan High Dam. Since 1978 it has stood in its own glass hall, facing Central Park.
Don't miss
• The Temple of Dendur.
• The Egyptian galleries.
• The 19th-century galleries.
• The Arms and Armor galleries.
• The Astor Court.
Did you know?
• The Astor Court is a Ming-style garden court modeled on one in Suzhou.
• The Met is said to have opened the world's first museum shop, in 1908.
• Every year the medieval hall, with its high arched ceiling, becomes home to the museum's elaborately decorated Christmas tree.