TOUR TO THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM WITH LICENSED TOUR GUIDE OF NEW YORK

TOUR TO THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM WITH LICENSED TOUR GUIDE OF NEW YORK

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest museum in the western Hemisphere. its collection has around 2 million art works, from antiquity to the present. The best way to approach this vast repository is to understand the museum's arrangement and select a limited number of areas to see during your visit. The museum plan is like a rectangle with a central stairway in the middle that divides right and left. Once you enter and pay your admission, if you walk up the grand staircase immediately in front of you, you will be on the second floor in what many consider to be the heart of this museum, its superior collection of European painting, sculpture and decorative arts.

I suggest always, when you enter the MET, to pick up a floor plan and take time to look it over and write your choices on it and then plan where to start. For the immense art heritage inside it's always recommended to hire a tour guide to explain properly the collections. The new Greco- Roman wing gives justice to the antiquities coming from Italy. In 1870 the Museum opened in temporary quarters. The next year it acquired a collection of 174 European paintings and hired the architect Mould to design the first building.

In 1887 an extraordinary loan of 37 European paintings instantly made the museum one of the best in the country, and after that financier J.P. Morgan died in 1913, his son gave about 40 percent of his huge collection to the museum. Other important acquisitions included in 1929 the collection of French Impressionists even if it took the museum decades to develop an interest in American art.