1000 5th Avenue @ 82nd Street

In 1865, the philanthropist John Jay first suggested the idea of a great museum in New York, a museum that would rival European institutions and give the average New Yorker a chance to see and learn about great art and architecture. With a number of other philanthropists from the Union League Club, Jay formed the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870.

Today the Met is the largest art museum in the world; it has more than two million items in its collection from a wide range of cultures and eras. It contains the most important collection of Egyptian art outside of Cairo; 30 paintings by Monet and 17 by Cézanne; representative pieces from other masters like Vermeer, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Rubens, and Rembrandt; and nearly 15,000 weapons in its “Arms and Armour” exhibit. Other collections cover everything from Ming Dynasty furniture to modern American painting.

The museum took its current location on Fifth Avenue in the 1870s, but at that time consisted of a small brick building. J.P. Morgan, who was president of the museum from 1904 to 1913, hired the firm of McKim, Mead, and White to design the current building.

The Met is known for focusing on older artwork, so much so that when Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney offered her collection of modern American paintings to the museum in 1930, the Met refused the offer. (Her collection became the base for the Whitney Museum.) Nonetheless the Met remains the most famous institution in New York and one of the most comprehensive art museums in the world.