Assistant Curator Deniz Beyazit shares highlights of the group's day trip to Bursa in Turkey.

The 2024 reinstallation of the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Galleries of Eighteenth-Century American Art of The Met’s American Wing elevates a pivotal moment in American furniture design between 1720 and 1770. This fresh installation encourages us t…

Angela Salisbury, senior associate for Archival Processing, details what she has learned about Mary Griggs Burke as a collector and philanthropist from a trove of Mrs. Burke's personal correspondence, scrapbooks, and documents.

The collection that Mary and Jackson Burke acquired in a period of only about ten years was truly a joint effort, and seldom has there been a couple who worked together so tirelessly and effectively to assemble a large group of important and beautiful works of art. Like all great collectors, they enjoyed the chase and the capture, but Jackson's greatest satisfaction came from showing his wonderful things to others in his own mini-gallery. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is proud to be able to show the full range of Mary and Jackson Burke's treasures to the public for the first time and to publish this catalogue, whose appearance Jackson eagerly anticipated. The joy these works will now bring to thousands is the finest tribute we can pay to Jackson, and we can be confident it will be the one that would have pleased him the most.

"The beauty of the Japanese aesthetic first struck me when I saw my mother's kimono, a padded winter garment of black silk with a bold design of twisted pine branches covered with snow.... I can remember putting it on and letting it trail behind me. It was then, I believe, that a future collector of Japanese art was born." The woman who wrote these words, Mary Griggs Burke, did indeed go on to become a collector of Japanese art. Thirty years later she visited Japan at the suggestion of the architect Walter Gropius, and "profoundly moved by the beauty of the paintings and sculpture that I saw...I fell in love with Japan." In the 1960s, she and her husband, Jackson, began to form their collection. The Mary Griggs Burke Collection, represented in this volume and in the exhibition it accompanies, is a testimony to the intensity and selectivity of Mrs. Burke's collecting, guided by a discerning eye, a deep affection for Japan, and an appreciation of the country's cultural heritage. In 1985, the Japanese government invited her to exhibit the collection at the Tokyo National Museum and two years later, in gratitude for her activities in support of Japanese art and all facets of Japanese culture, conferred on her the honorary medal of Sacred Treasure, Gold and Silver Star, Second Degree, a rare honor for a foreigner to receive. Long recognized as one of the finest collections of Japanese art in private hands, the Mary Griggs Burke Collection is the largest and most comprehensive outside Japan. The present selection, arranged chronologically, includes an astonishing ceramic vessel from the prehistoric Jomon period, rare examples of Shinto gods from the tenth century, and a recently acquired early depiction, dated 1278, of the Zen theme of the Ten Ox-Herding Songs, a metaphor for the quest for enlightenment. The Japanese genius for dramatic narrative is strongly represented by several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works depicting scenes from The Tale of Genji, the classic by Lady Murasaki Shikibu that tells the story of Genji, the Shining Prince. Other highlights are Willows and Bridge, an extraordinary pair of folding screens that exemplify the taste of the Momoyama period (1573-1615), and Women Contemplating Floating Fans, an important example of genre painting in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. While it provides a historical overview of the development of Japanese art, the collection illustrates as well Japan's capacity to foster divergent artistic traditions both from other cultures and from those that reflect indigenous tastes. It also demonstrates the profound impact of Buddhism on Japanese culture, the tastes and values of the courtly and military elite, and the interests of patrons who range from Sinophile rulers and scholars to pleasure-seeking urbanites.

"In the palace of art there are many chambers, and that of which Mr. Burne-Jones holds the key is a wondrous museum. His imagination, his fertility of invention, his exquisiteness of work, his remarkable gifts as a colourist—all these things constitute a brilliant distinction." With these words the American critic and novelist Henry James, in 1877, sang the praises of Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), the British painter and designer whose work was creating a sensation at the recently opened Grosvenor Gallery in London. A pupil of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and a protégé of John Ruskin, Burne-Jones belonged to the second generation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, creating a narrative style of romantic symbolism steeped in medieval legend and fused with the influence of Italian Renaissance masters that was to have widespread influence on both British and European art. Within the sophisticated culture of the late Victorian period Burne-Jones's star rose rapidly, and by the 1880s he had become the establishment artist par excellence, one of the most admired and sought-after painters in Europe. By the 1890s, however, Burne-Jones was ceding popularity to the growing taste for abstraction, and until recently he was all but ignored. Today, one hundred years after his death, in what John Christian, the leading authority on the artist, in this volume terms a "critical somersault," Burne-Jones is once again considered the greatest British painter of the nineteenth century—after only Turner and perhaps Constable. Edward Burne-Jones, Victorian Artist-Dreamer is the catalogue for the first exhibition in the United States devoted to this painter. The works in the exhibition, organized under the auspices of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, England, and the Réunion des musées nationaux, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, were selected by Stephen Wildman, Curator of the Ruskin Library at Lancaster University, England. A prodigiously productive artist, Burne-Jones, in addition to being a successful and innovative painter, was also an important force in the Arts and Crafts movement, working closely with his lifelong friend William Morris in the production of such decorative arts as ceramic tiles, stained glass, large-scale tapestries, and illustrated books to be printed at Morris's renowned Kelmscott Press. Examples of works in all these media are presented in the exhibition, with full-color and black-and-white reproductions of each of the 173 works included in the catalogue. Arranged chronologically, the volume is divided into eight sections, each introduced by a vibrant and broadly informative text by John Christian, followed by catalogue entries written by Mr. Wildman and Mr. Christian. An essay by the British scholar Alan Crawford explores Burne-Jones's contribution as a decorative artist, and an essay by Laurence des Cars, Curator at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, deals with the artist's reputation and influence in France and Belgium.

Curator Joanne Pillsbury looks back at the recently closed Golden Kingdoms exhibition and meditates on the power of art to frame, and reframe, our knowledge of past cultures.

Mellon Curatorial Fellow Rachel Parikh examines a shaffron (a piece of armor for a horse's head) potentially used by Indo-Islamic royalty.

Research Assistant Carol Santoleri explores George Stubbs's groundbreaking 1766 treatise.

Poetry and painting are deeply intertwined in Chinese culture. Many painters took ancient poetry as their inspiration, either directly illustrating famous verses or attempting to evoke them more subtly in the mind of the viewer. The poetic traditio…