Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET)

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American Decorative Arts

The collection of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum extends from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century and includes approximately twelve thousand examples of furniture, silver, glass, pewter, ceramics, and textiles. Present in the collection are objects made on Americ... [ + ]an soil from the early colonial period, reflecting the settlers' keen desire to reproduce as faithfully as possible the material world they had left behind in England, Holland, and other homelands. Styles adhered closely to overseas developments, though regional schools of cabinetmaking did emerge rather swiftly in Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and Charleston. Over the next two centuries, assimilating trends and techniques from across the Atlantic was the major preoccupation of American designers and craftsmen. The department's holdings reflect this ongoing dialogue, as well as the many truly original voices in American decorative arts.

The Metropolitan's collection of American stained glass is perhaps the most comprehensive anywhere and features the innovative work of Louis Comfort Tiffany. Also noteworthy is the rest of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century glass collection, including objects designed and produced by Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company; early furniture up to about 1820; Baroque-style silver of about 1700; presentation and exposition silver objects of the later nineteenth century; and nineteenth-century ceramics.

American Paintings and Sculpture

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 artist... [ + ]s- constitute an encyclopedic survey of fine art in America, from the late colonial period in the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. The collection has been assembled over more than a century, beginning almost immediately after the Museum's founding. (American paintings, sculpture, and drawings by artists born after 1878 are in the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, and all photographs in the Department of Photographs.)

Extraordinary in quality and exhaustive in scope, the department's collection of paintings has impressive concentrations of portraits, landscapes, and narrative scenes, as well as notable works by America's foremost painters, including John Singleton Copley, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, and John Sloan. The sculpture collection is equally distinguished and is especially strong in Neoclassical and Beaux-Arts works.

Please note that the galleries for American Paintings and Sculpture will reopen in late 2011, following a major renovation. Many of the colonial American paintings are now installed in the period rooms and adjacent decorative arts galleries. Other masterworks remain on view in The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art. Learn more about the American Wing renovation project.

Ancient Near Eastern Art

The Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art covers both a lengthy chronological span and a vast geographical area. The collection of more than seven thousand works of art ranges in date from 8000 B.C. (the Neolithic period) to the Arab conquest and rise of Islam beginning in A.D. 651. The works come ... [ + ]from ancient Mesopotamia, Iran, Syria, Anatolia, and other lands in the region that extends from the Black and Caspian Seas in the north to the southwestern Arabian peninsula, and from western Turkey on the Mediterranean Sea to the Indus River Valley in modern-day Pakistan and India. Societies throughout the ancient Near East maintained commercial and cultural contacts across great distances, although the routes, trade goods, and artistic styles and motifs that were exchanged varied in different periods.

Strengths of the department's collection, in formation for more than a century, include Sumerian sculptures; Anatolian ivories; Iranian bronzes; metalwork from Bronze Age Bactria in modern-day Afghanistan and Turkmenistan; and magnificent silver and gold vessels from the Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sasanian eras in Iran. These objects are joined by an extraordinary group of Assyrian stone reliefs depicting scenes of warfare and ritual and by enormous guardian figures, all from the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 B.C.) at Nimrud, as well as by fine ivory carvings, many of which originally served as furniture ornaments at that site. There is also a large collection of stamp and cylinder seals representative of the various cultures of the ancient Near East.

Arms and Armor

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. Thoug... [ + ]h 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.

Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas

The art of the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and North, Central, and South America are overseen by a single curatorial department at the Metropolitan. More than 11,000 works of art of varied materials and types represent at least four millennia of greatly diverse cultural tradi... [ + ]tions. The department's holdings range from ritual sculpture and monuments of wood and stone to gold and silver ornaments, masks, costumes, and other textiles. At one end of the department's vast chronological range are archaeological American objects from 2000 B.C.E.; at the other are African and Pacific works from our own time. Strengths of the collection include decorative and ceremonial objects from the Court of Benin in Nigeria; sculpture from West and Central Africa; sculpture in wood from New Guinea and the island groups of Melanesia and Polynesia; and objects of gold, ceramic, and stone from the Precolumbian cultures of Mexico and Central and South America.