The collection of American paintings and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum is one of the finest and most comprehensive in the world. More than one thousand paintings, six hundred sculptures, and 2,600 drawings—exceeding four thousand works in total—by approximately nine hundred different artists constitute an encyclopedic survey of fine art in America, from the late colonial period in the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. The collection has been assembled over more than a century, beginning almost immediately after the Museum's founding. (American paintings, sculpture, and drawings by artists born after 1878 are in the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, and all photographs in the Department of Photographs.)
Extraordinary in quality and exhaustive in scope, the department's collection of paintings has impressive concentrations of portraits, landscapes, and narrative scenes, as well as notable works by America's foremost painters, including John Singleton Copley, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, and John Sloan. The sculpture collection is equally distinguished and is especially strong in Neoclassical and Beaux-Arts works.
Please note that the galleries for American Paintings and Sculpture will reopen in late 2011, following a major renovation. Many of the colonial American paintings are now installed in the period rooms and adjacent decorative arts galleries. Other masterworks remain on view in The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art. Learn more about the American Wing renovation project.
Images and information related to more than three thousand works from the Museum's collection of American paintings and sculpture are available in the Collection Database. Although organized by medium (paintings, sculpture, works on paper), the works may also be sorted by title, artist, date, or accession number. The highlights from the department are organized chronologically by creation date.
The addition of the American Paintings and Sculpture records to the Collection Database has been made possible by The Brown Foundation, Inc., and the Oceanic Heritage Foundation.
More about the Department and Its Collection
Thanks to the strong support of such early trustees as Frederic Edwin Church, Eastman Johnson, and John F. Kensett—important artists in their own right—The Metropolitan Museum of Art has acquired examples of American art virtually since its founding in 1870. The first sculpture, an allegorical female nude by Hiram Powers entitled California, entered the collection in 1872, and shortly afterward a group of landscapes by Kensett himself, given by the artist's brother, launched the collection of American paintings.
Today the Metropolitan's collection of American art is supervised by two curatorial departments: American Decorative Arts, established in 1934, and American Paintings and Sculpture, established fourteen years later. Both are housed in The American Wing, which opened in 1924 as a highly innovative installation devoted largely to furnished period rooms. The wing was expanded substantially in 1980 to incorporate the first permanent galleries for American paintings and sculpture—the Joan Whitney Payson Galleries—and in 1988 with the opening of The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, where the Museum's entire reserve collection of American objects is on view; drawings, watercolors, and miniatures may be seen by appointment.
The collection of paintings in The American Wing includes masterworks by such artists as John Singleton Copley, Ralph Earl, Gilbert Stuart, George Caleb Bingham, Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Martin Johnson Heade, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, and James McNeill Whistler. Among the most celebrated paintings are Stuart's portrait of George Washington, Bingham's Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, Cole's View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow), Church's Heart of the Andes, Eakins's The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), and Sargent's Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau). The wing is also home to one of the best-known works in American art, Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's monumental 1851 canvas, Washington Crossing the Delaware.
The Department of American Paintings and Sculpture organizes large-scale special exhibitions, often encompassing works loaned by other institutions, as well as smaller, "dossier" exhibitions, which are drawn entirely from the permanent collection and are held in the Luce Center. See Features and Exhibitions for more information.
