The Metropolitan Museum of Art
One of the world’s great encyclopaedic museums, spanning 5,000 years of art on Fifth Avenue.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American businessmen, artists and civic leaders who wanted to bring art and art education to the public. It opened in 1872 in rented premises and moved in 1880 to its present site on the eastern edge of Central Park, where the first Gothic Revival building was designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould. Today it is the largest art museum in the United States and one of the most visited in the world.
The complex has grown through more than a century of additions. The Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue facade and Great Hall, designed by Richard Morris Hunt and completed by his son Richard Howland Hunt, opened in 1902, and McKim, Mead & White added the flanking wings. From the 1970s the firm of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates produced a master plan that enclosed the original structures within glass-walled wings, including the Sackler Wing housing the Temple of Dendur.
The permanent collection spans some 5,000 years and covers art from almost every part of the world, from ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern antiquities to European painting, arms and armour, musical instruments, costume and modern art. The museum also runs The Met Cloisters in northern Manhattan, dedicated to medieval Europe. A new wing for modern and contemporary art, designed by Frida Escobedo, is being built on the site of the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing.
Highlights
- Temple of Dendur, an Egyptian sandstone temple of about 15 BC in a glass-walled gallery
- Beaux-Arts Great Hall and Fifth Avenue facade completed in 1902
- Arms and Armor galleries with European, Japanese and Middle Eastern armour
- American Wing with period rooms and the Charles Engelhard Court
- European paintings including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh
![[King Thibaw Min's Throne Room - Mandalay]title QS:P1476,en:"[King Thibaw Min's Throne Room - Mandalay]"label QS:Len,"[King Thibaw Min's Throne Room - Mandalay]"](https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/02/Felice_Beato_%28British%2C_born_Italy_-_%28King_Thibaw_Min%27s_Throne_Room_-_Mandalay%29_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg/500px-Felice_Beato_%28British%2C_born_Italy_-_%28King_Thibaw_Min%27s_Throne_Room_-_Mandalay%29_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)
