The Metropolitan Museum of Art history

One of the first objects in The Met collection, it was purchased along with 173 other European old master paintings in 1871.

The museum first opened on February 20, 1872, housed in a building located at 681 Fifth Avenue.

In 1873, occasioned by the Met's purchase of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriot antiquities, the museum decamped from Fifth Avenue and took up residence at the Mrs.

In 1874, the acquisition of what was known as the Cesnola Collection instantly put the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the map as a player competing with some of Europe’s finest museums.

He sold a second collection to the Met in 1876, and three years later was hired to become the museum's first paid director.

Interior View of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when in Fourteenth Street (1881) by Frank WallerThe Metropolitan Museum of Art

By the time poor health forced him to resign his railroad presidencies in 1883, William Henry had nearly doubled the Vanderbilt family fortune.

8, 1885, New York, N.Y.), American railroad magnate and philanthropist who nearly doubled the Vanderbilt family fortune established and in large part bequeathed to him by his father, Cornelius.

Avery, Kevin J. "Asher Brown Durand (1796–1886)." Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.

The original Gothic-Revival-style building has been greatly expanded in size since then, and the various additions (built as early as 1888) now completely surround the original structure.

In 1901 New Jersey locomotive manufacturer Jacob S. Rogers, who had only been a supporter of the museum as a $10 per year member, died and left the bulk of his estate to the Met, totaling nearly $5 million.

The Museum's Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue facade and Great Hall, designed by the architect and founding Museum Trustee Richard Morris Hunt, opened to the public in December 1902.

Luigi Palma di Cesnola would also serve as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first director until his death in 1904.

The year 1905 launched a new era for The Met.

The Met launched its first excavation in 1906 and developed an intensive archaeological program in the next several decades that allowed it to build remarkable collections of ancient art.

With Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke serving as the museum's director, succeeded by his assistant Edward Robinson in 1910, the Met began to grow into a world-class organization supported by a strong professional staff.

Howe, Winifred E. (1913)

Barnard opened his original Cloisters on Fort Washington Avenue to the public in 1914.

The Met accumulated art at such a pace during the Morgan era that by 1915 the amount of city appropriations to maintain the collections had failed to keep pace, forcing the museum to turn to the public to raise additional funds.

She was even arrested for burning an effigy of President Woodrow Wilson at a protest outside the White House in 1919 and spent three nights in jail.

Despite increased funding from the city, the museum's money woes continued into the 1920s.

The Met’s American Wing opened in 1924 as an embodiment of these ideals.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s first trip to the American Southwest in 1929 may have inspired this painting, one of her most recognizable and reproduced compositions, which she gave to The Met as part of the Alfred Stieglitz collection.

The museum, whose trustees in 1939 averaged 60 years of age, was becoming regarded as stodgy, and other institutions began to challenge the Met's preeminence.

Rorimer at Neuschwanstein Castle (May 1945) by Photograph by United States Signal CorpsThe Metropolitan Museum of Art

From a Kees van Dongen 1950’s painting entitled “At The Racetrack”, to a 13th Century Syrian Biconical Bowl, Robert Lehman collected them and eventually gave them all to the museum.

Six years later, in 1954, Rorimer convinced the Museum to acquire it for The Met Cloisters, its branch in upper Manhattan devoted to medieval art.

Andrus, Vincent Dyckman. "The American Wing in 1957." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New ser., v.

While the Museum had already taken steps in this direction by establishing a department and spaces for Islamic art in 1963, it became a pioneer ahead of every other Western museum with the expansion.

The Thomas J. Watson Library, built in 1964 primarily for the use of the museum staff and visiting scholars, has one of the most complete art and archaeology reference collections in the world.

Feld, Stuart P. "'Loan Collection,' 1965." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v.

Described by the New York Times in 1966 as "harsh, but handsome," its crisp granite facade—sometimes dark gray, often pinkish—steps up and forward over the entrance, peppered with distinctive asymmetrical windows that reveal almost nothing of the interior activity.

After his death in 1969, the Robert Lehman Foundation donated close to 3,000 works of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Met’s 100th anniversary was celebrated in 1970 with great fanfare and an extensive building campaign to accommodate the growing collection.

Housed in the Robert Lehman Wing, which opened to the public in 1975 and largely financed by the Lehman Foundation, the museum has called it "one of the most extraordinary private art collections ever assembled in the United States".

The Treasury, which contains objects created for liturgical celebrations, personal devotions, and secular uses, was renovated in 1988.

In 1995 the Met launched a $300 million capital campaign.

In June 1998, the Arts of Korea gallery opened to the public, completing a major suite of galleries – a "museum within the Museum" – devoted to the arts of Asia.

In October 1999 the renovated Ancient Near Eastern Galleries reopened.

Galleries for Oceanic and Native North American Art also opened in 2007, as well as the new Galleries for Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Paintings and Sculpture and the Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education.

In 2009 Michael Gross published The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum, an unauthorized social history, and the museum bookstore declined to sell it.

On November 1, 2011, the Museum's New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia opened to the public.

In 2012, following the earlier appointment of Daniel Brodsky as chairman of the board at the Met, the by-laws of the museum were formally amended to recognize the office of the chairman as having authority over the assignment and review of both the offices of president and director of the museum.

3 (Winter, 2015). New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 2015.

On March 18, 2016, The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened The Met Breuer, a space dedicated to modern and contemporary art.

3 (Winter, 2017). New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017.

In January 2018, museum president Daniel Weiss announced that the century-old policy of free admission would be replaced by a $25 charge to out-of-state and foreign visitors, effective March 2018.

Photo: Brian Kachejian ©2019

The museum temporarily closed in March 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, and reopened in late August; this was the first time in over a century that the Met was closed for more than three consecutive days.