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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Adoration of the Shepherds, Francesco di Marco Marmitta da Parma  Emilian, Tempera and gold on parchment
Francesco di Marco Marmitta da Parma
ca. 1500
The Last Supper, Bernard van Orley  Netherlandish, Wool, silk, silver-gilt thread.
Bernard van Orley
Pieter de Pannemaker
ca. 1525–28
Self-portrait, Simon Bening  Netherlandish, Tempera and gold leaf on parchment
Simon Bening
1558
Large Boston Public Garden Sketchbook: The Huntington Avenue Streetcar, Maurice Brazil Prendergast   American, Watercolor over pencil
Maurice Brazil Prendergast
1895–1897
Saint Jerome as Scholar, El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos)  Greek, Oil on canvas
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos)
ca. 1610
Watch, Jacques Goullons  French, Case and dial of enameled gold; hand of steel; movement of brass, partly gilded, and steel
Jacques Goullons
ca. 1645–48
Secretary, Martin Carlin and French, Oak veneered with tulipwood, amaranth, holly, ebonized holly, and other marquetry wood; brass; green-colored metal; gilt-bronze mounts; marble top.  Soft paste porcelain plaques from the Sèvres Manufactory.
Multiple artists/makers
ca. 1781–85
Madame Félix Gallois, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres  French, Graphite with touches of gold in oil to highlight jewelry, on buff wove paper.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
1852
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