A room within the Robert Lehman Collection at The Met with red walls displays framed Renaissance religious paintings, a dark ornate chest, and wooden furniture.

The Robert Lehman Collection

About Us

The Robert Lehman Collection is one of the most distinguished privately assembled art collections in the United States. Robert Lehman's bequest to The Met, a collection of extraordinary quality and breadth acquired over the course of sixty years, is a remarkable example of twentieth-century American collecting. Spanning seven hundred years of western European art, from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries, the 2,600 works include paintings, drawings, manuscript illumination, sculpture, glass, textiles, antique frames, maiolica, enamels, and precious jeweled objects.

The collection of approximately three hundred paintings is particularly rich in the field of the Italian Renaissance, notably the Sienese school, as well as early Northern European works. Included in the 750 Old Master drawings ranging from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries is a significant group of eighteenth-century Venetian works, as well as other distinguished Italian, French, and Northern European examples. The collection is also renowned in several areas of decorative arts: Renaissance maiolica, Venetian glass, and antique frames.

Our History

Robert Lehman's parents, Philip and Carrie Lehman, laid the foundation for the collection around 1905, when they began acquiring works of art for their recently completed townhouse on West 54th Street in New York City. Robert Lehman assembled his collection with scholarly knowledge, astute connoisseurship, and skillful negotiation of the art market. Upon his death in 1969, he bequeathed 2,600 works to The Met with the stipulation that they be exhibited as a private collection, reflecting his belief that "important works of art, privately owned, should be beyond one's own private enjoyment and [that] the public at large should be afforded some means of seeing them." A new wing, erected to display the collection, opened to the public in 1975. The Robert Lehman Wing includes a central skylit gallery surrounded by a series of rooms intended to recreate the Lehman family residence. Velvet wall coverings, draperies, furniture, and rugs evoke the ambience of private interiors and serve as a backdrop for this extraordinary collection.

Read more about the history of the collection (PDF).


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Holy Face, Gerard David  Netherlandish, Tempera and gold leaf on parchment that has been trimmed and laid down on thin walnut
Gerard David
ca. 1485–90
Bust of Pseudo-Seneca, Peter Paul Rubens , and Assistant (?) Flemish, Pen and brown ink over black chalk heightened with white, with brush and gray ink
Peter Paul Rubens
1600–1626
Portrait of Alvise Contarini(?); (verso) A Tethered Roebuck, Jacometto (Jacometto Veneziano)  Italian, Oil on wood; verso: oil and gold on wood
Jacometto (Jacometto Veneziano)
ca. 1485–95
Street Scene in Paris (Scène de rue à Paris), Félix Vallotton  Swiss, Gouache and oil on cardboard.
Félix Vallotton
1897
Design for a Wall Monument, Francesco di Giorgio Martini  Italian, Pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash, blue gouache, on vellum
Francesco di Giorgio Martini
ca. 1490
Men Shoveling Chairs (Scupstoel), Vranke van der Stockt  Netherlandish, Pen and brown ink over traces of black chalk.
Vranke van der Stockt
1444–50
Before Dinner, Pierre Bonnard  French, Oil on canvas
Pierre Bonnard
1924
Saints Bartholomew and Simon, Master of Saint Francis  Italian, Tempera and gold on wood, Italian, Umbria
Master of Saint Francis
1266–75
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