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Go to the Museum's new YouTube playlist: Message from the Director. The most comprehensive display of Japanese arms and armor ever to be shown comes together this fall in an extraordinary exhibition featuring more than two hundred objects, including thirty-four designated National Treasures, more than three times the number of official National Treasures ever lent by the Japanese government to a single show. Drawn exclusively from public and private collections in Japan, "Art of the Samurai: Japanese Arms and Armor, 1156–1868" explores the greatest achievements of this unique facet of Japanese art. These masterpieces in steel, silk, and lacquer, as well as painted scrolls and screens, demonstrate the superb craftsmanship and fine materials so highly valued by samurai patrons of the arts. From another part of the world, the occasion this fall of the four hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson's historic voyage from Amsterdam to New York brings what is perhaps the most admired painting by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) to the Metropolitan. This exquisite work, The Milkmaid, on loan from the Rijksmuseum to celebrate the quatercentenary and not seen in the United States since 1939, joins five other Vermeer paintings and several extraordinary works by other seventeenth-century Dutch masters. Learn more about this presentation. In the century following Hudson's voyage, artists here began portraying ordinary people engaged in familiar tasks and pleasures. "American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915," the first overview of the subject in thirty-five years, features iconic works by such revered painters as John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, John Sloan, and many others who captured the temperament of their respective eras. From the decade before the Revolution to the eve of World War I, these artists responded to themes such as courtship, marriage, and family life; the creation and reinforcement of community and citizenship; attitudes towards race; the reality and myth of the frontier; and the process and meaning of art making. Their paintings tell compelling stories that are at once familiar and remarkable. This breathtaking season includes so much more. The offerings are exceptional; come visit soon. 
Thomas P. Campbell |
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