The Robert Lehman Collection

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.