Metropolitan Museum of Art

Based on Wikipedia: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Five dollars for a bottle of water. Seven at the kiosk nearest the Egyptian wing. The Metropolitan Museum of Art—the Met, as New Yorkers call it with the casual possessiveness reserved for institutions they consider family—has mastered the art of monetizing thirst. The water fountains, a guard explained recently, have been turned off.

But here's the thing about the Met: it will frustrate you, exhaust you, and quite possibly bankrupt you at the café, and you'll still come back. You'll come back because this sprawling palace on Fifth Avenue contains one and a half million objects spanning five thousand years of human creativity, and somewhere in those two million square feet of galleries, there's always something that will stop you cold.

An American Ambition

The Met began as an idea hatched in Paris.

In 1866, a group of Americans celebrating the Fourth of July at a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne listened as John Jay—lawyer, diplomat, and grandson of the Founding Father—made an impassioned case. America needed a great museum, he argued. The nation was wealthy, growing, and culturally hungry. Why should Americans have to cross an ocean to see masterpieces?

Four years later, in 1870, a coalition of philanthropists, artists, and businessmen turned that dinner conversation into reality. Their stated goal was almost touchingly earnest: to create a national institution that would "inspire and educate the public." In an era when American museums were rare and European institutions often restricted access to the upper classes, this was a democratic vision. Art for everyone.

The museum opened in a building on Fifth Avenue in 1880. That original structure has been swallowed entirely by subsequent expansions. Today's Met is a palimpsest of architectural additions, wings sprouting from wings, galleries opening into more galleries, a building that seems to grow organically like a coral reef.

By floor area, it ranks as the fourth-largest museum in the world and the largest art museum in the Americas. In 2024, nearly six million people walked through its doors, making it the most-visited museum in the United States.

The Temple in the Glass Room

If you've visited the Met even once, you probably remember the Temple of Dendur.

It sits in a soaring gallery on the museum's north side, surrounded by a shallow reflecting pool, bathed in natural light streaming through a massive wall of windows overlooking Central Park. The temple is made of honey-colored sandstone, and something about the combination—the ancient stone, the modern glass, the water, the trees beyond—creates a space that feels almost sacred.

The temple itself is roughly two thousand years old, built during the reign of Augustus Caesar to honor the Egyptian goddess Isis and two deified sons of a local Nubian chieftain. For nearly two millennia, it stood on the banks of the Nile in southern Egypt. Then came the Aswan High Dam.

In the 1960s, Egypt began constructing a massive dam that would create a reservoir four hundred miles long. Dozens of ancient monuments faced submersion. The United Nations launched what it called the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, an unprecedented effort to relocate priceless structures before the waters rose.

Egypt, grateful for American contributions to the rescue effort, gave the Temple of Dendur to the United States in 1965. The question became: where should it go? Proposals poured in from across the country. Some suggested placing it outdoors in Washington, D.C. Others wanted it in the Smithsonian.

New York won. The Met spent over a decade designing and building the perfect home for its new treasure. When the Sackler Wing opened in 1978, the temple had been reassembled stone by stone, each block precisely positioned according to extensive documentation made before dismantling. The installation is more than a display; it's an architectural argument that ancient and modern can coexist in conversation.

The Egyptian Collection Beyond the Temple

The temple may be the star, but the Met's Egyptian holdings extend far deeper. Forty galleries house more than twenty-six thousand objects, almost all of them on permanent display. The collection spans from the Paleolithic era—when the earliest humans chipped stone tools along the Nile—through the Ptolemaic period, when Greek pharaohs ruled a fading empire.

Nearly half of these objects came from the Met's own archaeological excavations, conducted between 1906 and 1941. Under the leadership of Albert Lythgoe, the museum's first Egyptian curator, teams dug at sites throughout Egypt, uncovering tombs, temples, and everyday objects that tell the story of ordinary lives.

One of the collection's most enchanting discoveries happened in 1920 at a site called the Southern Asasif, near ancient Thebes. In a tomb, excavators found a set of wooden models depicting daily life in the Middle Kingdom, around four thousand years ago. These aren't grand monuments or gold treasures. They're miniature scenes: tiny boats with crews, a garden with a pool, a granary with workers carrying sacks, a carpenter's workshop, a butcher shop with meat hanging from hooks.

Twenty-four models were found in total. Egypt kept half; the Met received the other twelve, plus one additional figure. These delicate objects—fragile wood, faded paint—offer a window into Egyptian life that no colossal statue can provide. They show us that ancient Egyptians, like us, had jobs and chores and pleasures.

Then there's William.

William the Faience Hippopotamus has become the Met's unofficial mascot. He's small—you could hold him in one hand—and made of a bright blue ceramic called faience. His body is decorated with painted lotus flowers and plants, representing the marshes where hippos lived along the Nile. Ancient Egyptians placed hippo figurines in tombs because the animals were associated with regeneration and rebirth, but also because hippos were genuinely dangerous, and perhaps a ceramic version was safer than the real thing.

The museum staff named him William in the 1930s, reportedly because he seemed to need a name. He appears on mugs, tote bags, and holiday cards. He is beloved.

A Wing for Art Once Called "Primitive"

For most of its history, the Met showed little interest in art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.

The museum acquired some Peruvian antiquities as early as 1882, and Mesoamerican objects trickled in over the decades. But these were afterthoughts, curiosities relegated to storage or displayed as ethnographic specimens—the work of "primitives," as the terminology of the time dismissively put it.

Nelson Rockefeller changed that. The governor of New York, scion of one of America's wealthiest families, had assembled more than three thousand objects from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. He offered them to the Met, but the museum wasn't interested. Art from these regions didn't fit its idea of what belonged in a great museum.

So Rockefeller founded his own institution in 1957: the Museum of Primitive Art, located in a townhouse on West Fifty-fourth Street. The name sounds jarring now, but Rockefeller's intention was actually radical. He wanted these objects judged as art—on aesthetic terms, for their beauty and craftsmanship—rather than dismissed as anthropological artifacts.

The Met eventually came around. In 1968, the museum agreed to host a temporary exhibition of Rockefeller's collection. The show was a revelation. Curators and visitors alike recognized the power of these works. The Met requested that the collection stay permanently.

Rockefeller agreed to donate everything. But there was tragedy behind the gift. The wing that would eventually house the collection was named for his son Michael, who had died in 1961 while on an art-collecting expedition in New Guinea. Michael Rockefeller was twenty-three years old. His boat capsized, and though his companions survived, Michael was never found. Some believe he drowned; others suspect he was killed by members of the Asmat people, though this has never been confirmed.

The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing opened in 1982. Today it holds more than eleven thousand objects from sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas, spanning from 3,000 BCE to the present. The range is staggering: forty-thousand-year-old Aboriginal rock paintings from Australia; fifteen-foot memorial poles carved by the Asmat of New Guinea; ceremonial objects from the Kingdom of Benin in Nigeria, donated by art dealer Klaus Perls; gold ornaments from pre-Columbian Peru; carved jade masks from ancient Mexico.

The materials are as diverse as the cultures: precious metals, of course, but also porcupine quills, feathers, shells, bark cloth, and human hair.

The Benin Bronzes Question

Some of the wing's most celebrated objects are also among its most contested.

In 1897, British soldiers invaded the Kingdom of Benin, located in what is now southern Nigeria. They looted the royal palace, carrying away thousands of bronze plaques, carved ivory tusks, and brass heads that had adorned the court for centuries. These objects, known collectively as the Benin Bronzes, were scattered to museums across Europe and America.

The Met acquired several pieces, including bronzes that passed through the collection of Augustus Pitt Rivers, a British lieutenant who had participated in the 1897 raid. One bronze acquired by the Met in 1972 was originally auctioned in April 1900 for thirty-seven guineas—roughly equivalent to a skilled worker's annual wages at the time.

Nigeria has long demanded the return of these objects, and in recent years, museums have begun to respond. The conversation continues at the Met, as it does at institutions worldwide. The question of who rightfully owns cultural patrimony—the communities that created it, the nations where it originated, or the museums that have preserved and displayed it—has no easy answer.

Asia Across Four Thousand Years

The Met's Asian Art department is arguably the most comprehensive collection of its kind in the United States. More than thirty-five thousand objects span four millennia, representing China, Japan, Korea, India, Nepal, Tibet, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and beyond.

This strength traces back to the museum's earliest days. Many of the philanthropists who donated to the fledgling institution in the 1870s and 1880s included Asian objects in their gifts. They were collectors of their era, fascinated by the "exotic East" and eager to acquire its treasures. Their orientalism was often condescending, but their generosity was real, and the collection they seeded has grown into something extraordinary.

An entire wing is now dedicated to Asian art. One of its most beloved spaces is the Astor Court, a complete Ming Dynasty-style garden courtyard. The design is based on the Master of the Nets Garden in Suzhou, China, considered one of the finest examples of classical Chinese garden architecture.

Building the Astor Court required flying in craftsmen from China who worked without power tools, using traditional techniques unchanged for centuries. The result is an oasis of calm amid the museum's bustle: whitewashed walls, dark wooden lattice, carefully placed rocks, a covered walkway opening onto a courtyard with a central pool. It's a garden designed for contemplation, and visitors often sit quietly for long stretches, momentarily transported.

The collection includes exceptional holdings in Chinese calligraphy and painting, Cambodian sculpture from the Khmer empire, Indian works representing Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and Japanese screens and armor. But the department's curators emphasize that "art" in the Western sense doesn't fully capture what's displayed here. Many objects were functional: tea bowls made for daily use, textiles meant to be worn, ritual implements employed in religious ceremonies. The boundary between art and craft, sacred and secular, dissolves in these galleries.

The Ancient Near East

In the late nineteenth century, as archaeologists began excavating the great civilizations of Mesopotamia, the Met started acquiring its own holdings from the region. What began with a few cuneiform tablets—those distinctive wedge-shaped impressions pressed into clay that constitute humanity's earliest writing—has grown to more than seven thousand objects.

The collection represents a sweep of human history almost impossible to comprehend: from the Neolithic period, when humans first began farming and building permanent settlements, through the fall of the Sasanian Empire in the seventh century CE. That's roughly ten thousand years of human civilization, encompassing the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Elamites, and Persians.

Among the highlights: the Stele of Ushumgal, a Sumerian monument from around 2900 BCE, carved with images of a ruler and inscriptions that are among the earliest examples of historical record-keeping. There's the Elamite silver sculpture of a kneeling bull holding a vessel, an object so finely crafted that it's hard to believe it's four thousand years old. The Pratt Ivories are delicate carved panels that once decorated furniture.

But the most imposing objects are the lamassu: massive stone guardian figures that once flanked the entrances to Assyrian palaces. These creatures have human heads—bearded, wearing elaborate crowns—mounted on the bodies of winged bulls or lions. They stand over ten feet tall and weigh tons. The Met's lamassu come from the Northwest Palace of King Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled the Assyrian Empire in the ninth century BCE.

Standing before a lamassu is a confrontation with antiquity. These figures were designed to intimidate—to signal that beyond this threshold lay power beyond ordinary comprehension. Nearly three thousand years later, they still do their job.

European Paintings: Building a Collection

The Met's European paintings collection began somewhat inauspiciously in 1871, when the museum purchased 174 paintings from European dealers. Almost two-thirds of those initial acquisitions have since been sold off or quietly removed from the collection—a polite way of saying they weren't very good.

But some keepers remained: works by Jacob Jordaens, Anthony van Dyck, Nicolas Poussin, the father-and-son painters Giambattista and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, and Francesco Guardi. These formed a nucleus around which something greater could grow.

The transformation came through gifts. In 1889, 1890, and 1891, Henry Gurdon Marquand donated paintings that gave the Met a serious foundation. More importantly, Marquand's generosity established a precedent. He showed wealthy Americans that donating Old Masters to a public museum was both respectable and desirable. Other collectors followed his example.

Benjamin Altman's bequest in 1913 was large enough and fine enough to put the Met on the international map. Jules Bache's gift in 1949 added more masterworks. Robert Lehman's collection, which came to the museum in 1975, was especially strong in early Italian Renaissance material—those delicate tempera paintings on gold ground that glow with an almost otherworldly light.

But perhaps no donors shaped the collection more profoundly than Charles and Jayne Wrightsman, who over several decades gave ninety-four paintings of extraordinary quality. When Jayne Wrightsman died in 2019, her bequest completed the gift. Museum scholars have written that "the Wrightsman paintings are highest in overall quality and condition" of all the major bequests. The Wrightsmans collected carefully, consulting extensively with Met curators, deploying advancing technology to authenticate works and assess condition. They were, in effect, an auxiliary purchasing arm for the museum.

The Impressionists and Their Revolution

A Renoir entered the Met's collection as early as 1907, making the museum an early institutional champion of Impressionism. Today, the Met describes its holdings of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art as "second only to the museums of Paris."

This is not modesty. The collection includes major works by Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Paul Gauguin. Galleries devoted to this material are among the most crowded in the museum; visitors cluster around paintings they've seen reproduced countless times, finally encountering the real thing.

The foundation was laid by Louisine and Henry Osborne Havemeyer. Henry was a sugar magnate; Louisine was a friend of the artist Mary Cassatt, who advised her on purchases. Together they assembled one of the great private collections of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly strong in works by Courbet, Camille Corot, Manet, Monet, and above all Degas.

When Louisine died in 1929, twenty-two years after her husband, she left the bulk of the collection to the Met. It was a transformative gift. The museum suddenly held not just examples of Impressionism but depth—multiple works by each major artist, enough to trace the evolution of styles and preoccupations.

More recently, Walter and Leonore Annenberg promised their collection to the Met. Before they did, the couple spent decades living with their paintings in their California home, surrounded by Monets and van Goghs and Cézannes. The gift, when it finally came, reinforced the Met's position as one of the world's great repositories of nineteenth-century French painting.

Painting Outdoors

For decades, one corner of European painting history remained underrepresented at the Met: plein air sketches.

Plein air is French for "open air," and it refers to the practice of painting outdoors, directly from nature, rather than composing landscapes in a studio from memory or imagination. This practice revolutionized Western art. When artists began carrying their easels outside—made possible by new technologies like portable paint tubes and lightweight canvas—they encountered light and atmosphere in ways that transformed how paintings looked.

Plein air painting was the crucible in which Impressionism was forged. Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and their circle painted outdoors obsessively, capturing the fleeting effects of sunlight on haystacks, on water, on cathedral facades. But before them came generations of less famous artists who pioneered the approach.

The Met's collection of these earlier plein air works—oil sketches made in Italy, France, and elsewhere by artists from across Europe—is now, in the museum's own assessment, "unrivaled." This happened recently and somewhat accidentally.

In 2003, the museum sold a Monet and used the proceeds to purchase a share of the collection assembled by Wheelock Whitney III, known as Lock. When the dealer and collector Eugene Thaw saw how beautifully the Whitney paintings looked in the Met's newly designed small-scale galleries, he and his wife Clare donated their own substantially larger collection.

The result transformed a previously top-heavy collection. Where the Met had once been dominated by famous French artists, it now includes many little-known painters from across Europe—artists not otherwise represented in American museums. These sketches form a bridge to what became the avant-garde. Looking at them, you can see Impressionism being born.

A Stolen Coffin

In 2018, the Met unveiled a spectacular acquisition: a gilded coffin from the first century BCE, once the resting place of Nedjemankh, a high priest of the ram-headed god Heryshaf. The coffin gleamed with gold leaf and was covered in intricate images and hieroglyphs describing the journey to the afterlife.

The museum paid $4 million for it. The documentation seemed legitimate. Curators celebrated the acquisition as a major addition to the Egyptian collection.

Then investigators from the Manhattan District Attorney's office came calling.

The coffin, it turned out, had been stolen from Egypt during the chaos following the 2011 revolution. The documents accompanying its sale were forgeries. The Met had been duped—or, critics suggested, had failed to ask hard enough questions about an object that seemed too good to be true.

In 2019, the museum returned the coffin to Egypt. The case became a cautionary tale about the antiquities market, where looted objects are laundered through dealers and auction houses with fabricated provenance. Even the world's most prestigious museums can become unwitting participants in this trade.

The Cloisters

The Met isn't confined to Fifth Avenue. In the northern reaches of Manhattan, at Fort Tryon Park, sits the Cloisters—a branch of the museum devoted entirely to medieval European art and architecture.

The building itself is an artwork. Constructed in the 1930s with funding from John D. Rockefeller Jr., it incorporates architectural elements from five medieval French cloisters—the covered walkways, often surrounding a garden, found in monasteries and cathedrals. These elements were disassembled in Europe, shipped across the Atlantic, and reassembled on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River.

The setting is deliberately atmospheric. Unlike the main building's urban context, the Cloisters sits amid parkland, with views of the river and the Palisades cliffs of New Jersey. Rockefeller purchased the land across the river specifically to preserve those views from development.

Inside, the collection spans a thousand years of medieval art: illuminated manuscripts, carved ivories, tapestries, metalwork, and painting. The most famous objects are the Unicorn Tapestries, a series of seven woven hangings depicting the hunt for a mythical unicorn. Made around 1500, probably in the Netherlands, they are among the finest surviving examples of medieval textile art.

Everything Else

We haven't mentioned the arms and armor—one of the world's great collections of weapons, from Japanese samurai swords to European jousting lances. Or the musical instruments, including Stradivari violins still played in concerts today. Or the costume collection, documenting what people have worn across centuries. Or the American Wing, tracing art and design from colonial times through the early twentieth century, complete with period rooms transplanted whole from demolished buildings.

The Met contains multitudes. Seventeen curatorial departments. Six conservation labs. A scientific research department that analyzes the chemical composition of pigments and the molecular structure of bronzes. A library with hundreds of thousands of volumes.

The collection officially lists one and a half million objects, down from a peak of over two million in 2000. That decrease reflects not loss but reassessment—deaccessioning duplicates, clarifying records, acknowledging that some items don't meet the standards of a great museum.

No one could see it all. The galleries span two million square feet. If you spent thirty seconds looking at each object on display, you would need weeks. And most of the collection isn't on display at all; it's stored in climate-controlled vaults beneath and around the building, available for study but hidden from casual visitors.

The Ongoing Renovation

Museums don't stand still. In December 2021, the Met began a $70 million renovation of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing—the galleries housing African, Oceanic, and ancient American art. The project was originally scheduled to begin in 2020 but was delayed by the pandemic.

The renovation addresses both aesthetics and infrastructure. The wing's glass curtain wall, which provides natural light to the galleries, had deteriorated over four decades. The reinstallation of forty thousand square feet of gallery space will allow three thousand works to be displayed with updated lighting, improved climate control, and fresh interpretive materials.

Every museum renovation is also a curatorial rethinking. How should these objects be presented? What stories should the wall texts tell? How can the museum address the complicated histories of acquisition—the colonial expeditions, the looting, the power imbalances that brought so many objects from their places of origin to New York?

These questions have no final answers. Each generation of curators confronts them anew.

Five Dollars for Water

The Met charges a suggested admission of $30 for adults, though New York State residents can legally pay whatever they wish, including nothing. The building is free to enter for members, for children under twelve, and for students from New York-area schools.

This is a compromise. For years, the Met operated on a strict pay-what-you-wish policy for everyone, one of the few major museums in the world to do so. But financial pressures forced a change in 2018. Now the full suggested price is mandatory for most out-of-state and international visitors.

Critics mourned the loss of universal accessibility. Supporters noted that the museum still loses money on every visitor and needs revenue to maintain its collection and buildings. The water fountains, apparently, were another casualty of this calculus.

But here's what hasn't changed: the Met remains one of the great democratic spaces in American culture. Rich and poor, locals and tourists, art historians and first-time visitors all wander the same galleries, stand before the same masterpieces, feel the same catch of breath when something beautiful appears around a corner.

A museum is a strange institution. It pulls objects from their original contexts—temples, tombs, palaces, homes—and arranges them in neutral white rooms for strangers to examine. Something is always lost in that translation. A Benin bronze torn from its kingdom, a temple dismantled from the Nile, a painting removed from the church altar it was made to adorn—none of these objects can mean exactly what they meant in their original settings.

But something is gained, too. Millions of people who will never travel to Egypt can stand before the Temple of Dendur. A child from the Bronx can encounter a Vermeer. A visitor from Tokyo can see how the Asmat of New Guinea carved their memorial poles.

The Met, for all its contradictions—its thirst for acquisition, its complicated histories, its seven-dollar water bottles—remains a place where the full sweep of human creativity is gathered under one roof. It's exhausting. It's overwhelming. It's worth the visit.

Just bring your own water.