In formation since 1870, the Metropolitan Museum's collection now contains more than two million works of art from all points of the compass, ancient through modern times. The Museum's collection of Old Master and nineteenth-century European paintings, one of the greatest such collections in existence, numbers approximately 2,200 works, dozens of which are instantly recognizable worldwide. The French, Italian, and Dutch schools are most strongly represented, with fine works also by British, Netherlandish, German, Spanish, and ... Read more

In formation since 1870, the Metropolitan Museum’s collection now contains more than two million works of art from all points of the compass, ancient through modern times.

The Museum’s collection of Old Master and nineteenth-century European paintings, one of the greatest such collections in existence, numbers approximately 2,200 works, dozens of which are instantly recognizable worldwide. The French, Italian, and Dutch schools are most strongly represented, with fine works also by British, Netherlandish, German, Spanish, and Flemish masters. The department’s holdings which consist not only of paintings on canvas and wood but also of frescoes, oil sketches, and finished pastels on paper, as well as a small number of Greek and Russian icons range in date from the twelfth through the nineteenth century. Among its many masterpieces are exceptional assemblages of the work of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo; of the French Impressionists (the Museum owns thirty-seven Monets and twenty-one oil paintings by Cezanne); and of Vermeer, whose five canvases at the Metropolitan surpass the number at any other museum in the world.

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.

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.