A Museum · New York, United States
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Deep Dive
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded on 13 April 1870 when a group of American businessmen, financiers, artists and thinkers, inspired by a desire to bring great art and art education to the American public, secured an Act of Incorporation from the New York State Legislature. The museum opened to the public on 20 February 1872 in a rented building at 681 Fifth Avenue, with its first holdings consisting of a Roman sarcophagus and 174 European paintings. In 1880 the Met moved to its current site on the eastern edge of Central Park, and the Beaux-Arts facade facing Fifth Avenue, designed by Richard Morris Hunt and completed in 1902, remains the museum's public face today, though the building as a whole is an accretion of more than twenty structures added over a century and a half, spanning roughly a quarter-mile in length. The Met is organized into 17 curatorial departments covering more than 5,000 years of world culture, from ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern art to American, European, Asian, Islamic, Oceanic and contemporary art, and it operates additional sites including the medieval-focused Met Cloisters in northern Manhattan. It is the largest art museum in the United States and among the largest in the world by collection size, and remains one of the most-visited museums globally, drawing on both an encyclopedic permanent collection and a heavily attended program of special exhibitions.
Highlights
- ∞Founded in 1870 by a coalition of American businessmen, artists and philanthropists seeking to bring great art to the American public
- ∞Main Fifth Avenue Beaux-Arts facade designed by Richard Morris Hunt, completed 1902, part of a building that is an accretion of over 20 structures
- ∞Occupies a site on the eastern edge of Central Park spanning over 2 million square feet of floor space
- ∞17 curatorial departments cover more than 5,000 years of world art and culture
- ∞The Temple of Dendur, an ancient Egyptian temple gifted by Egypt, is reassembled in its own purpose-built gallery
- ∞Operates The Met Cloisters, a dedicated museum of medieval European art and architecture in northern Manhattan
- ∞Largest art museum in the United States and among the largest in the world by object count
- ∞Costume Institute's annual Met Gala is one of the most prominent events in global fashion and popular culture
Notable works
- Washington Crossing the Delaware, Emanuel Leutze (1851)
- Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), Jackson Pollock (1950)
- Portrait of Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso (1905–1906)
- Portrait of Juan de Pareja, Diego Velázquez (1650)
- Temple of Dendur, Ancient Egyptian (Roman period Nubia) (c. 15 BC)
- Wheat Field with Cypresses, Vincent van Gogh (1889)
- Madame X, John Singer Sargent (1883–1884)
Sources
- 1. Metropolitan Museum of Art - Wikipedia
- 2. History of The Met - Official Metropolitan Museum of Art site
- 3. A Brief History of the Museum - Metropolitan Museum of Art press release
- 4. Metropolitan Museum of Art | New York, History, Collection - Britannica
- 5. An Overview of the Museum - Metropolitan Museum of Art press release
The masterworks
Enter the gallery.
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Own the masterpiece the museum guards. Every work held by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States that we recreate is finished by hand on archival canvas, numbered as a strictly limited Heirloom edition and built to be inherited — from ₹50,000, delivered across India with white-glove care.