MetPublications

This Bulletin centers around Turner’s depictions of whaling and seascapes. These expressive paintings, created when the artist was in his seventies, exemplify the boldly inventive style of Turner’s later years. The Bulletin explores Turner’s interest in images of whaling, considers the connections to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and discusses the enduring appeal of these evocative marine scenes.

This Bulletin marks the centennial celebration of the founding of the Department of Asian Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Showcasing some of the Met's most beautiful examples of Asian Art along with archival material, this Bulletin is a compact but lushly illustrated account of one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of the paintings, sculptures, textiles, and decorative arts of Asia.

This Bulletin discusses Lucas Cranach's Saint Maurice and the importance of this saint during the stormy period of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. Anticipating the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, this Bulletin draws on the work of donor Mrs. Eva S. Kollsman and connects this image of Saint Maurice to sculptural relics belonging to Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, the most powerful Roman Catholic prelate at the time.

This Bulletin examines the fascinating stories behind the only known sets of unicorn tapestries in the world—one at The Met Cloisters and another at the Musée de Cluny, Paris. The thirteen tapestries that compose the two sets—six at the Cluny and seven at The Met—remain shrouded in mystery, with their origins and original owners still unknown. Considering the iconography of these two collections together and drawing from primary sources, this Bulletin aims to reach a better understanding of these masterworks and their mythical subject that has captured the public imagination for centuries.

The Gosford Wellhead is one of the most remarkable works of Roman sculpture to enter The Met collection in decades. This Bulletin traces the marble wellhead’s surprising journey to New York, beginning with its discovery in Ostia, Rome’s ancient port, in 1797, and including a long residence in Gosford House, one of Scotland’s most majestic private homes. The authors closely examine the marble wellhead’s superbly carved imagery of two Greek myths related to water: Narcissus and Echo and Hylas and the Nymphs. Uncovering impressive early restorations and featuring a modern technical analysis, this Bulletin provides a focused study of a singular masterpiece whose cultural history weaves from ancient Rome to the present day.

This Bulletin celebrates a masterpiece of American art—the magnificent Garden Landscape window, which foregrounds women’s contributions to the art of Tiffany.

This Bulletin, celebrating the reopening of The Met's Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, reintroduces the Museum’s collection of art from sub-Saharan Africa.

The Met’s collection of drawings, prints, and photographs is an expansive work in progress and is considered one of the nation’s greatest repositories of humanity’s creativity. This Bulletin celebrates the centennial of the founding of the Department of Prints. William M. Ivins, the visionary founding curator of the department, had an expansive view of what constituted a “work on paper”—a philosophy that informed much of The Met’s collecting over the next century. The result today is a comprehensive repository reflecting an astonishing diversity of artists, genres, and media. Arranged as a provocative series of pairings—one drawing or print with one photograph—this Bulletin invites the reader to find connections and divergences between works of art that are rarely seen together, ranging in date from the fifteenth century to present day.

Published to coincide with the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Thomas Chippendale, England’s most famous cabinetmaker, this issue of the Bulletin addresses the history of Chippendale works at The Met. Morrison H. Heckscher recounts the designer’s meteoric rise from rural obscurity to the heights of the London luxury trade, crediting that remarkable success to the publication of the Chippendale Director, an instructive book on furniture design and ornament. The text analyzes the Museum’s rare collection of drawings by Chippendale, revealing a gifted and highly imaginative designer who mastered what today would be called branding. Illustrating a wide selection of the Director drawings alongside furniture inspired by the Director or actually made in Chippendale’s shop, this Bulletin features works of art that attest to the museum’s century-long infatuation with drawing, prints, books, and furniture in the Chippendale style.

In the days before color photography, hand-colored drawings and photographs were the principal means of documenting polychrome Greek art. Beginning in the late 1870s, Émile Gilliéron recorded major archaeological discoveries in Greece shortly after their excavation. This Bulletin, accompanying an exhibition of five watercolors by Gilliéron, features the Swiss draftsman’s drawings of sculptures from the Athenian Acropolis. On view for decades after their acquisition, Gilliéron’s watercolors were eventually retired to The Met's basement, likely in the late 1940s, before the advent of modern conservation practices. Reproductions and copies fell out of fashion, and Gilliéron’s work remained in storage until 2015. In addition to telling the story of the watercolors during Gilliéron’s time, this Bulletin follows the conservators’ heroic efforts to rehabilitate these forgotten pieces. Images of the conserved watercolors, published here for the first time, provide fascinating insight into the sculptures found at the Acropolis as they appeared when they were first unearthed around the turn of the century.