The Robert Lehman Collection—one of the most extraordinary private art collections ever assembled in the United States—was presented to the Metropolitan Museum by the Robert Lehman Foundation in 1969, following Mr. Lehman's death. The collection of nearly three thousand works of art, which had been assembled by Mr. Lehman, a longtime Museum trustee, and by his father, Philip, is housed today in The Robert Lehman Wing. The galleries, which opened to the public in 1975, were designed to evoke the ambience of Lehman's own house on West 54th Street in New York City, with wall fabrics, draperies, furniture, and rugs that set the objects in an intimate, personal context.
Thanks to Lehman's acute connoisseurship and adroit negotiation of the art market, the collection is extremely strong in several areas of European art. Its approximately three hundred paintings favor the Italian Renaissance, especially the Sienese school, and the early northern masters, but range as far afield as the Fauves and beyond. Its more than seven hundred Old Master drawings include a rich trove of eighteenth-century Venetian works as well as other important Italian, French, and northern examples. The remaining two thousand objects in many media in the collection fall into the category of decorative arts; the concentrations of Venetian glass and Renaissance majolica are particularly noteworthy.
Highlights from the department are presented online, organized by object type (paintings, drawings, and decorative arts) and, within these categories, loosely by chronology and region.
More about the Department and Its Collection
When a portion of Robert Lehman's collection was exhibited at the Orangerie in Paris in 1956, it garnered accolades from French critics who might not have expected the scion of an American investment banking family to display such refined taste and robust instincts in the field of fine art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was fortunate indeed to have exhibited the collection for several years while Lehman was still alive, and when the necessity of keeping the works together was disclosed as a condition of the gift, the Museum was determined to identify a workable means of doing so. The Robert Lehman Wing, a pyramidal structure of glass, limestone, and concrete designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, with a central court surrounded by two concentric, perforated walls two stories high, preserves the Museum's 1880 facade of red brick and gray granite—a designated landmark by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould—as its east wall.
This modern core of the wing, bathed in natural light, serves as an open lobby for a series of small galleries that stand in striking contrast to its spare simplicity. Within the galleries, a rich jewel-like palette predominates, with silk and velvet wall fabrics, gilded accents, chandeliers, tapestries, and dark wood furniture. The works of art settle into this environment as comfortably as they did in Lehman's home—as much-loved belongings, selected by a single individual. Since many rooms contain objects from disparate periods and places but with aesthetic affinities, the galleries in The Robert Lehman Wing allow emotion and visual pleasure to outweigh purely didactic considerations.
The collection is particularly strong in paintings of the Italian Renaissance, especially those of the Sienese school, including works by Ugolino da Siena, Simone Martini, Giovanni di Paolo, and the mysterious Osservanza Master. Florentine painters are also well represented—outstanding among this group is an Annunciation by Botticelli. Other Italian paintings in the collection include a rare pair of portraits of the Emilian school and important panels by the Venetians, such as Jacometto Veneziano and Giovanni Bellini.
The Lehman Collection is also distinguished for a significant body of paintings by early northern masters, including Petrus Christus, Hans Memling, the Master of Moulins (Jean Hey), and Hans Holbein. Other strengths lie in Dutch and Spanish paintings, notably those by Rembrandt, El Greco, and Goya, and in French masterworks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by such artists as Ingres and Renoir and by the Postimpressionists and the Fauves.
The collection of Old Master drawings is world-renowned and includes rare early Italian works, important sheets by Dürer, Rembrandt, and the Flemish masters, a large group of French works of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, and close to two hundred eighteenth-century Venetian drawings.
Renaissance majolica (tin-glazed earthenware with polychrome decoration), Venetian glass, furniture, enamels, jewelry, textiles, and bronzes—including a remarkable series of northern aquamanilia (containers for water)—form the core of an outstanding array of decorative arts. The department also holds one of the largest assemblages of antique frames in the world.
Since its opening twenty-five years ago, The Robert Lehman Wing has become a leading resource center, particularly for the study of Renaissance culture, through special exhibitions of its own and other materials, the publication of catalogues of the collection, and a specialized library that is open to scholars and students (see Educational Resources).
