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 Cézanne); and of Vermeer, whose five canvases at the Metropolitan surpass the number at any other museum in the world.
The entire collection of the Department of European Paintings is presented online and is organized first by country and, within countries, chronologically by artist. You may choose to view the selected highlights or to proceed through the entire collection, dwelling in those schools and on those artists you find particularly appealing.
More about the Department and Its Collection
In 1870, the year of the Museum's founding, a public campaign was launched to raise funds to acquire works of art. The next year, the trustees voted to spend $116,180.27 for 174 paintings, mostly seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish. A Department of Paintings was established in 1886 to administer these and all other paintings, prints, and drawings acquired by the Museum, regardless of their date or national origin. As the collection grew, other departments were formed to handle various elements of this collection, and in 1950 the curatorial responsibility of the department had narrowed enough for it to be renamed the Department of European Paintings. Its curators continued to collect drawings, however, until a separate department was founded for that purpose in 1960.
The history of the collection is marked by extraordinary gifts and bequests of European paintings and funds for further acquisition. Among the earliest were those of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe (1887) and Henry Marquand (1889). In 1901, the Museum received a bequest of almost $7 million from Jacob S. Rogers for the purchase of works in all fields. The Fortune Teller by Georges de La Tour, The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and Cypresses by Vincent van Gogh are just three examples of the many hundreds of objects acquired through this fund over the years. In 1917 a bequest of works of art and funds for additional acquisitions was received from Isaac D. Fletcher. Velázquez's splendid portrait of Juan de Pareja was acquired in 1971 principally from the Fletcher Fund.
In 1929 the bequest of the H. O. Havemeyer Collection brought to the Museum not only Old Masters but also unrivaled works by the French Impressionists. Among the works owned by Mr. and Mrs. Havemeyer were El Greco's View of Toledo, the portrait of Joseph-Antoine Moltedo by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, many paintings and pastels by Edgar Degas, and Claude Monet's The Four Trees. Michael Friedsam's bequest in 1931 strengthened the department's holdings of early French and Netherlandish paintings. The collection formed by Jules Bache, which included superb eighteenth-century French paintings and notable works by Crivelli, Goya, and van Dyck, was deposited in the Museum in 1949.
Since 1973, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman have presented to the Museum many paintings of the highest quality. Their gift in 1981—Rubens's portrait of himself, his wife, and their son—is an outstanding example of the discriminating generosity that has made the Museum what it is today. Since 1974, Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg have allowed their promised bequest of fifty-three Impressionist and Postimpressionist works to be exhibited for six months each year in the Nineteenth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture Galleries, a suite of twenty-one rooms that were redesigned to accommodate the Museum's Romantic, Barbizon, Impressionist, and Postimpressionist works, with the incomparable Annenberg Collection in their midst. Another recent renovation project, completed in November 1999, involves seven galleries for early Italian paintings, which were rebuilt to provide natural light.
In addition to the glories of its permanent galleries, the Department of European Paintings organizes or co-organizes several special exhibitions per year. Some of these are based entirely on its own collection, such as "Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art" (1998); some are drawn almost entirely from outside institutions, such as "Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara" (1999); but most are distinguished by the integration of works owned by the Metropolitan with loans from private and public collections around the world, such as with "Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch" (1999).
