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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Bust of a Man in a Hat Gazing Upward, Martin Schongauer  German, Pen and carbon black ink, over pen and brown ink, on paper prepared with sanguine wash.
Martin Schongauer
ca. 1480–90
The Assumption of the Virgin, Bernardo Daddi (possibly with workshop assistance) Italian, Tempera on wood, gold ground
Bernardo Daddi
ca. 1337–39
Condesa de Altamira and Her Daughter, María Agustina, Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes)  Spanish, Oil on canvas
Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes)
1787–88
Portrait of a Woman, Possibly a Nun of San Secondo; (verso) Scene in Grisaille, Jacometto (Jacometto Veneziano)  Italian, Oil on wood; (verso: oil and gold on wood)
Jacometto (Jacometto Veneziano)
ca. 1485–95
Armorial tazza, Italian (Venice) or façon de Venise (Venetian-style), Colorless (slightly gray) nonlead glass; blown, pattern-molded, enameled, gilt, Venetian or façon de Venise, or French
Italian
French
1499–1514
Coronation of the Virgin, Giovanni di Paolo (Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia)  Italian, Tempera on wood, gold ground
Giovanni di Paolo (Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia)
ca. 1455
Self-portrait, Simon Bening  Netherlandish, Tempera and gold leaf on parchment
Simon Bening
1558
Three Virtues (Temperance, Hope, and Fortitude or Justice) and Studies of a Seated Man, Lorenzo Monaco (Piero di Giovanni)  Italian, Metalpoint, touches of brush and brown wash, heightened with white (partially oxidized in the figure at the lower left), on reddish violet prepared paper.  Some lines retraced in pen and brown ink at a later date., Italian, Florence
Lorenzo Monaco (Piero di Giovanni)
ca. 1420
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