Travel Tips

The collection of armor, edged weapons, and firearms in The Metropolitan Museum of Art ranks with those of the other great armories of the world, in Vienna, Madrid, Dresden, and Paris. It consists of approximately 15,000 objects that range in date from about 400 B.C. to the nineteenth century. Though Western Europe and Japan are the regions most strongly represented—the collection of more than five thousand pieces of Japanese armor and weapons is the finest outside Japan—the geographical range of the collection is extraordinary, with examples from the Near East, the Middle East, India, Central Asia, China, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and North America. The focus is on outstanding craftsmanship and decoration—that is, items often intended solely for display rather than for actual use, from minute ornamental sword fittings to full suits of armor.

Fifty highlights from the Department of Arms and Armor are presented online and are organized first by country of origin and, within countries, chronologically

The Metropolitan Museum of Art received its first examples of arms and armor in 1881. Thanks to a substantial group of Japanese arms and armor and a major private collection of European arms and armor, both acquired by purchase in 1904, the Museum's collection quickly achieved international recognition. This led to the establishment of a separate Department of Arms and Armor in 1912, which remains the only one of its kind in the United States.

The 50,000 objects in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts constitute a comprehensive and important historical collection, one of the Metropolitan Museum's largest, reflecting the development of a number of art forms in the major Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The department's holdings cover the following areas: sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also collected by the department.

Distinguished works of Italian Renaissance and eighteenth-century French sculpture abound in a series of gallery spaces, ranging from the soaring and sunlit Carroll and Milton Petrie European Sculpture Court to beautifully appointed period rooms. Among the department's best-known masterpieces in marble are Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Bacchanal and Houdon's portrait of his infant daughter, Sabine. From the nineteenth century there is an extensive collection of sculptures by Rodin and Degas. Displays of furniture and smaller objects provide a lavish and comprehensive survey of styles in the decorative arts, documenting the achievements of master craftsmen across Europe in this era.

The Department of Modern Art surveys painting, sculpture, drawings and watercolors, decorative arts, design, and architectural representations from about 1900 to the present day in more than 10,000 works, primarily by European and American artists. The Metropolitan Museum has been concerned with the art of its own time, as well as that of the past, since its founding in 1870. Many of the objects acquired as contemporary in the early decades of the Museum's existence are now in the collections of other departments—The American Wing, for instance, or the Department of European Paintings.

Those works that entered the collection before the turn of the century and still qualify as "modern" join many, many more acquired over the past hundred years. The strengths of the modern-art collection are housed in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing. Of particular note are the paintings by members of the School of Paris, such as Braque, Picasso, and Modigliani; paintings and drawings by the circle of early American modernists around Alfred Stieglitz; over ninety works by Paul Klee; large-scale paintings by the postwar Abstract Expressionists; bronzes by Elie Nadelman and Gaston Lachaise; as well as paintings, drawings, and prints by the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer. The modern design collection features prominently the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh; the work of Josef Hoffmann and other members of the Wiener Werkstätte; Art Nouveau jewelry by René Lalique; Art Deco furniture by Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann; and Italian and Japanese objects of the 1970s.

Fifty highlights of the Department of Modern Art are presented online. Listed first are the works of fine art, including painting, sculpture, and works on paper, in alphabetical order by artist's name; design and architectural objects follow, also in alphabetical order by artist's name. For twentieth-century photographs and prints, see the Department of Photographs and the Department of Drawings and Prints, respectively

Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 19th century (between 1804–06)
By Antonio Canova (Italian, born in Possagno, active in Venice and especially Rome, 1757–1822)
Italian (Rome); Made in Rome, Italy
Marble; H. 86 5/8 in. (220 cm)
Fletcher Fund, 1967 (67.110.1)

The collection of American paintings and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum is one of the finest and most comprehensive in the world. More than one thousand paintings, six hundred sculptures, and 2,600 drawings—exceeding four thousand works in total—by approximately nine hundred different artists constitute an encyclopedic survey of fine art in the United States, from the late colonial period in the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. These works have been gathered over the course of more than a century, beginning almost immediately after the Museum's founding. (Paintings and sculpture created by artists born after 1876 are overseen by the Department of Modern Art, and all photographs by the Department of Photographs.)

Extraordinary in quality and exhaustive in scope, the department's collection of paintings has impressive concentrations of eighteenth-century portraits and Hudson River school landscapes, as well as notable works by America's foremost painters, including George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins. The sculpture collection is equally distinguished and is especially strong in Neoclassical and Beaux-Arts works. The department's holdings are exhibited together with those of the Department of American Decorative Arts in The American Wing.

The online database of American paintings and sculpture is organized by medium—paintings first, followed by sculpture, and then works on paper. Within each section, works are arranged first by artists' birth dates and then by medium. You may also choose to view highlights from the Department of American Paintings and Sculpture, organized chronologically by creation date.

The Temple of Dendur, ca. 15 B.C.E.; Roman period
Egyptian; Nubia, Dendur
Sandstone; L. from gate to rear of temple 82 ft. (24 m 60 cm)
Given to the United States by Egypt in 1965, awarded to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967, and installed in The Sackler Wing in 1978 (68.154)

The collection of ancient Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum ranks among the finest outside Cairo. It consists of approximately 36,000 objects of artistic, historical, and cultural importance, dating from the Paleolithic to the Roman period (ca. 300,000 B.C.–4th century A.D.). More than half of the collection is derived from the Museum's thirty-five years of archaeological work in Egypt, initiated in 1906 in response to increasing public interest in the culture of ancient Egypt. Today, virtually the entire collection is on display in thirty-two major galleries and eight study galleries, with objects arranged chronologically. Overall, the holdings reflect the aesthetic values, history, religious beliefs, and daily life of the ancient Egyptians over the entire course of their great civilization.

The Department of Egyptian Art is particularly well known for the Old Kingdom mastaba (offering chapel) of Perneb (ca. 2450 B.C.); a set of Middle Kingdom wooden models from the tomb of Meketre at Thebes (ca. 1990 B.C.); jewelry of Princess Sit-hathor-yunet of Dynasty 12 (ca. 1897–1797 B.C.); royal portrait sculpture of Dynasty 12 (ca. 1991–1783 B.C.); and statuary of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut of Dynasty 18 (ca. 1473–1458 B.C.). The department also exhibits its invaluable collection of watercolor facsimiles, most of which are copies of Theban tomb paintings produced between 1907 and 1937 by members of the Graphic Section of the Museum's Egyptian Expedition.

Fifty highlights from the department are presented online in approximate chronological order, and are identified by dynasty and/or period

The Department of Egyptian Art was established in 1906 to oversee the Museum's already sizable collection of art from ancient Egypt. The collection had been growing since 1874 thanks to individual gifts from benefactors and acquisition of private collections (such as the Drexel Collection in 1889, the Farman Collection in 1904, and the Ward Collection in 1905), as well as through yearly subscriptions, from 1895 onward, to the Egypt Exploration Fund, a British organization that conducted archaeological excavations in Egypt and donated a share of its finds to subscribing institutions.

Also in 1906, the Museum's Board of Trustees voted to establish an Egyptian Expedition to conduct archaeological excavations at several sites along the Nile. Instrumental in this decision was J. Pierpont Morgan, the Museum's president, who visited the expedition periodically until his death in 1913. At the time, the Egyptian government (through the Egyptian Antiquities Service) was granting foreign institutions the right to excavate with the understanding that the resulting finds would be divided fifty-fifty between the excavators and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The Metropolitan Museum was granted concessions for the Middle Kingdom royal cemeteries of Lisht, a site located on the west bank of the Nile approximately thirty miles south of modern Cairo; the Late Dynastic Period temple of Hibis at Kharga Oasis in the western desert; the New Kingdom royal palace at Malkata; and the Middle and New Kingdom cemeteries and temples of Deir el-Bahri in the Theban necropolis opposite modern Luxor. Subsequently, the Egyptian Antiquities Service granted access to other sites as well, among them the important Predynastic cemetery of Hierakonpolis in southern Egypt