In the heart of New York City is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This large museum has many different types of art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, also known as the Met, is famous for its vast collection of various types of artwork. This legendary museum is the home to pieces of art that range from European and American paintings to weapons and armor from all around the world to sculptures and temples of Egypt. This museum is truly one of a kind.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a long history beginning in 1866. American tourists in Paris viewed art and thought that New York City should have an art museum as well. John Jay, the President of the Union League Club, gave a speech that supported the American tourists' idea. On February 20, 1872 the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened for the first time and was located at 681 Fifth Avenue in New York City. The first president of the museum gave a portion of his personal collection to the museum. The first superintendent was the publisher George Palmer Putnam. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's initial collection contained a Roman sarcophagus and one hundred forty-seven European paintings.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchase of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriot antiquities caused the museum to move from Fifth Avenue to Douglas Mansion on West 14th Street. This new home was temporary. Then they moved to their permanent home on the east side of Central Park. The museum's new building was designed by American architects Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mold. The present structure of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is still the original structure, but additional attachments were added. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently almost a quarter mile long and takes up more than two million square feet. The current size of the museum is twenty times the size of the original structure.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art there are many departments with unique exhibits within them. Some departments are Ancient Near Eastern Art, Arms and Armor, Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, Asian Art, Costume Institute, Drawings and Prints, Egyptian Art, European Paintings, European Sculpture and Decorative Art, Greek and Roman Art, and Islamic Art. The three most visited departments are Egyptian Art, European paintings, and Arms and Armor.
A majority of the initial collection of Egyptian Art came from a private collection. Archeological excavations between 1906 and 1941 found half of the current Egyptian Art collection. The Egyptian Art collection contains 36,000 pieces of art. The most valuable pieces are a set of twenty-four wooden models discovered in Deir el Bahir in 1920 in a tomb that depicts Egyptian life in Early Middle Kingdom which included boats, gardens, and scenes of daily life. One special attraction is the Temple of Dendur. This temple was disassembled by the Egyptian government to save it from rising water which was caused by the construction of the Aswan High Dam. In 1965, this sandstone temple was given to the United States. In 1978, it was assembled in the museum's Sackler Wing. It is located in a large room that is surrounded by a reflecting pool.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a renowned collection of European paintings. Although the collection only contains 2,200 pieces of art, it contains some of the most prominent paintings. The museum concentrates on buying Old Masters and nineteenth century European paintings with a focus on French, Italian, and Dutch artists. The museum owns thirty-seven paintings by Monet, twenty-one oil paintings by Cezanne, and eighteen paintings made by Rembrandt which includes Aristotle with a Bust of Homer. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has the largest collection of Vermeer's paintings which is five. Other eminent paintings of the collection are Self- Portrait with a Straw Hat by Van Gogh, The Harvesters, made by Pieter Bruegel, The Fortune Teller made by Georges de La Tour, and The Death of Socrates made by Jacques-Louis David.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's department of Arms and Armor is unique. It has a large collection of armored figures. The collection includes late medieval European pieces and Japanese pieces from the fifth through the nineteenth centuries. The Arms and Armor collection contains arms and armor from Egypt, ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Ancient Near East, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Over 15,000 objects were used by kings and princes. The collection even includes armor that belonged to Henry II of France and Ferdinand I of Germany.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the most unique museums in the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art still continues to amaze people of every generation with its diverse and distinctive collection of art from all around the world. It is the heart of all art in New York City.