Heritage · Museum
The Metropolitan Museum of Art : Iconic Art, History & Exhibits
The Metropolitan Museum of Art showcases a rich collection of artifacts, art, and cultural history. Explore exhibits, key highlights, and visitor information.Written to last — not to trend.
By Confinity Heritage Editorial · 2026-07-20 · 7-minute readQuiet tools, not a toolbar.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, known to almost everyone simply as the Met, is the largest art museum in the United States and one of the most comprehensive collections of human artistic achievement anywhere in the world. It stands on the eastern edge of Central Park, along the stretch of upper Fifth Avenue that New Yorkers call Museum Mile, at the address 1000 Fifth Avenue. Behind its Beaux-Arts front the museum holds roughly 1.5 million works that reach back more than 5,000 years, from Paleolithic tools and pharaonic sculpture to canvases finished in living memory. It was founded in 1870 by a group of civic-minded lawyers, financiers, and artists who wanted a young republic to have a public collection worthy of comparison with the great museums of Europe, and it has grown into a building of about two million square feet that fronts the park for close to a quarter of a mile. In fiscal year 2025 it drew more than 5.7 million visitors, making it the most-visited museum in the United States and one of the most-visited art museums in the world.
The Met began as an idea shared over dinner in Paris. On the Fourth of July, 1866, a group of Americans living and travelling in France gathered to mark Independence Day, and the lawyer and diplomat John Jay, grandson of the first Chief Justice of the United States, used the moment to argue that the nation should found what he called a "national institution and gallery of art." His listeners took the proposal home. Members of the Union League Club of New York, together with businessmen and artists, carried the effort forward, and on April 13, 1870 the Metropolitan Museum of Art was formally incorporated.
At its founding the museum owned nothing at all. It had a charter, a board of trustees, and an ambition, but no building and no collection. Its first acquisition arrived later that year, on November 20, 1870, when it purchased a Roman stone sarcophagus. In 1871 it bought a group of 174 European paintings, among them works attributed to Anthony van Dyck and Nicolas Poussin, and with that purchase the outline of an encyclopedic collection began to appear.
The Met opened to the public on February 20, 1872. Its first home was rented: the Dodworth Building at 681 Fifth Avenue, a former dancing academy between 53rd and 54th Streets, secured on a one-year lease. The quarters were cramped almost at once, and within a year the museum moved south to the Douglas Mansion at 128 West 14th Street. Neither address could hold a collection that kept growing by gift and purchase, and the trustees pressed for something permanent.
The answer came from the city itself. New York set aside land on the eastern side of the newly laid-out Central Park, and in 1880 the museum opened the first section of the building it still occupies today. That early structure faced into the park rather than out toward Fifth Avenue, and it looked nothing like the temple front visitors know now. The move to Central Park settled the fundamental question of what the Met would be: not a private cabinet of curiosities but a public institution, on public land, charged with teaching as much as with displaying.
The Met organizes its holdings into 17 curatorial departments, and the ambition behind that structure is plain. The museum set out to represent the whole span of human art in a single place, and the departments trace that span across continents and millennia.
The Department of Egyptian Art is among the museum's crowd-drawing strengths. Its centerpiece is the Temple of Dendur, a small sandstone temple built around 15 BCE under the Roman emperor Augustus, reconstructed stone by stone inside a glass-walled gallery. Around it the department holds tens of thousands of objects excavated or acquired over more than a century, from monumental statuary to the small painted things buried with the dead.
The galleries of European paintings hold some of the best-known pictures in North America. The Met owns five paintings by Johannes Vermeer, more than any other museum in the world, among a body of surviving Vermeers that numbers only in the mid-thirties. Nearby hang canvases by Rembrandt, Velázquez, El Greco, and the French Impressionists, along with Vincent van Gogh's "Wheat Field with Cypresses" and his "Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat."
The American Wing gathers painting, sculpture, and decorative arts made in the United States, and its most recognizable holding is Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware, the enormous 1851 canvas depicting the general and the Continental Army crossing the ice-choked river on the night of December 25 to 26, 1776. The wing also holds Gilbert Stuart's portraits of George Washington and period rooms transplanted whole from early American houses.
The galleries of Greek and Roman art run the length of a long wing on the museum's south side, from Cycladic figurines of the third millennium BCE through Attic vases, Roman portrait busts, and wall paintings recovered from villas near Pompeii. They stand as a reminder that the Met was conceived in part as a teaching collection, a place where a student in New York could study the classical past without crossing an ocean.
Other departments give the collection its unusual reach. The Department of Musical Instruments preserves the oldest surviving piano in the world, built in 1720 by the Florentine instrument maker Bartolomeo Cristofori, who invented the instrument around the turn of the eighteenth century. The Arms and Armor galleries display parade armor and edged weapons from Europe, the Islamic world, and Japan. The Department of Asian Art fills a large suite of galleries built around a Ming-dynasty scholar's courtyard, and the galleries for the art of the Arab lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and later South Asia present one of the deepest collections of Islamic art outside those regions. In a skylit wing on the west side hangs the Robert Lehman Collection, an assembly of Old Master and later paintings, drawings, and decorative arts given to the museum in 1975 by the banker Robert Lehman and displayed, by the terms of the gift, in rooms evoking his family townhouse.
In May 2025 the Met reopened the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing after a renovation of about 70 million dollars that had closed the galleries since 2021. First opened in 1982 and named for Nelson Rockefeller's son, the roughly 40,000-square-foot wing is devoted to the arts of Africa, the ancient Americas, and Oceania, and the reconstruction reorganized how those works are displayed and interpreted. Taken together the departments hold a collection of roughly 1.5 million objects; in 2000 the museum's own count exceeded two million, and the figure it now publishes reflects a more careful accounting rather than any loss.
The Met's home on Fifth Avenue is really several buildings absorbed into one, and its architectural history is a record of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American taste. The original 1880 structure was designed in High Victorian Gothic style by Calvert Vaux, co-designer of Central Park, together with Jacob Wrey Mould. Critics were unkind. One called the red-brick and stone building a "mausoleum," and even the museum's own president judged it "a mistake." The building still exists, but it is now buried inside the museum, its Gothic walls visible only from certain interior galleries.
Expansion began almost at once. A south wing followed in 1888 and a north wing in 1894, and then the museum turned its face toward the city. The grand Beaux-Arts front on Fifth Avenue, with its great arched entrance, the vaulted Great Hall behind it, and the Grand Stairway, was designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the first American to train at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Hunt died in 1895 before it was built, and his son Richard Howland Hunt completed the facade in 1902, with architectural sculpture by Karl Bitter. Between roughly 1910 and 1926 the firm of McKim, Mead & White extended the limestone wings north and south along the avenue, giving the museum the long classical frontage it presents today.
The facade carries a famous unfinished detail. Above the paired columns that flank the entrance sit four piles of rough, uncarved limestone. They were meant to become sculptural groups representing four great ages of art: Ancient, Classical, Renaissance, and Modern. A shortage of money after financial panics around the turn of the century, along with disagreement over how the modern age ought to be shown, ended the plan, and the blocks were left as blocks. Thousands of people photograph the entrance every day, and most never notice that its crowning ornament was never carved.
The scale is easy to underestimate from the street. The building now covers about two million square feet and runs nearly a quarter of a mile along Fifth Avenue, with roughly 633,000 square feet given over to galleries, more than twenty times the footprint of the 1880 original. Inside, the Great Hall with its high domes still serves as the point where most visits begin, and the Grand Stairway still leads up to the European paintings, much as Hunt intended.
Few museum objects arrive with a story as improbable as the Temple of Dendur. When Egypt built the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, the rising waters of Lake Nasser threatened to drown a stretch of Nubian monuments, and an international rescue campaign coordinated by UNESCO moved many of them to safety. In gratitude for the United States' contribution of about 16 million dollars toward that effort, Egypt gave the temple to the United States in 1965, a gift accepted by the former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. President Lyndon Johnson awarded it to the Met in 1967, and after more than a decade of planning the temple opened to the public in its purpose-built gallery, the Sackler Wing, on September 27, 1978. A reflecting pool and a wall of angled glass overlooking Central Park stand in for the Nile and the desert light.
The museum's most public annual moment happens through the Costume Institute, which merged into the Met in 1946 and holds a collection of fashionable dress reaching back centuries. Its fundraising benefit, the Met Gala, was founded in 1948 by the fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert as a fifty-dollar midnight supper. Under Diana Vreeland, a special consultant to the Institute from 1972 to 1989, the evening grew into a themed spectacle tied to each year's costume exhibition. Since 1995 the Vogue editor Anna Wintour has chaired the gala, moving it to the first Monday in May and turning the red carpet into one of the most closely watched events in fashion and celebrity culture.
The Met has long lived in the popular imagination as well. It supplies the setting for the fictional heists of "The Thomas Crown Affair" and "Ocean's 8," and a painting hanging in its galleries drives the plot of Donna Tartt's novel "The Goldfinch." In 2017 the museum widened its reach in a quieter but far-reaching way through its Open Access initiative, releasing images of hundreds of thousands of public-domain works under a Creative Commons Zero designation, free for anyone to use for any purpose. Its long-running online project, the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, maps works from the collection against a chronological, cross-cultural account of art, and has become a standard teaching reference well beyond New York.
The Met's stated purpose is to collect, study, conserve, and present significant works of art across time and across cultures, and that mission shapes what it holds and how it holds it. Behind the galleries sit conservation studios and scientific laboratories where paintings, textiles, metals, and paper are examined, stabilized, and repaired, work that is largely invisible to visitors but central to why the objects survive at all.
Part of what the museum preserves is not on Fifth Avenue. In 1938 the Met opened a branch dedicated to the art of medieval Europe, The Cloisters, in Fort Tryon Park at the northern tip of Manhattan. It was built around architectural fragments, including sections of several French monastic cloisters, gathered by the American sculptor George Grey Barnard before the First World War. The collector and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. bought Barnard's assemblage for the museum in 1925, donated the parkland, and funded a new building by the architect Charles Collens that incorporated the medieval stonework into a coherent whole. The Cloisters holds about 5,000 works, most of them from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries, and its best-known treasures include the Unicorn Tapestries and the illuminated "Belles Heures" of Jean de France, Duke of Berry.
Preservation at a museum of this scale is not only technical but ethical, and the Met has increasingly said so in public. The 2025 reinstallation of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing was accompanied by fuller accounts of where objects came from and how they entered the collection, part of a wider reckoning across major museums over provenance, colonial-era acquisition, and the display of art from cultures that had no say in how their work travelled. The institution that once aimed simply to gather the art of the world is now also asking, in its labels and its scholarship, how that art should be cared for and told.
The Met operates on two sites, and a single ticket covers both on the same day. The main building, The Met Fifth Avenue, sits at 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, reachable from the 4, 5, and 6 subway lines at the 86th Street station and by several Fifth and Madison Avenue bus routes. The Met Cloisters lies about ten miles north in Fort Tryon Park, near the 190th Street station on the A line, and rewards the longer trip with medieval galleries set among terraced gardens above the Hudson River.
General admission for adults is 30 dollars, with reduced rates for seniors and students and free entry for children under twelve accompanied by an adult. The museum keeps an important local exception: residents of New York State and students from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut may still pay what they wish rather than the set price. The Fifth Avenue building is generally open daily except for a handful of holidays, with later hours on Friday and Saturday evenings, and the quietest visits tend to fall on weekday mornings. Both buildings are wheelchair accessible, offer assistive-listening and other services by advance arrangement, and provide cafés, cloakrooms, and shops. Given the size of the collection, most visitors do well to choose a few departments rather than attempt the whole museum in one day.
History and founding
The collection
The building
Cultural significance
What it preserves
Visiting
References and resources
- History of The Met, the museum's official account of its founding and growth
- Visit The Met, current hours, admission, and directions for both locations
- Metropolitan Museum of Art on Wikipedia, with departmental detail and citations
- The Met Fifth Avenue on Wikipedia, a history of the building and its architects
- Metropolitan Museum of Art at Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Temple of Dendur, the story of the museum's ancient Egyptian temple
- The Cloisters, the Met's branch for medieval European art
- A brief history of the Met Gala from the Costume Institute
- The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing reopening, on the 2025 galleries for Africa, the ancient Americas, and Oceania
- The Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, the museum's chronological survey of world art