That’s a view of the city from Central Park. We were on our way to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is one of the worlds foremost art museums. I’d never been, and KLS couldn’t remember ever being, and after today we can hardly believe it took us so long!
That’s a Van Gogh, one of a roomful, itself a single room in the modern French section which included many paintings from all the masters. It was mind boggling, and you could spend half a day here alone! But this was only a tiny part of the museums collection of two million items.
They have Asian art, including an entire calligraphy section:
American art including many Tiffany windows:
An incredible collection of arms and armour:
A massive Egyptian section including an entire temple (‘The Temple of Dendur’) that was transported from Egypt and is now displayed in a massive hall:
They have ancient roman sculpture (SO much of it!):
Collections of antique furniture:
Ancient Indian art:
And more, and more, and so much more. We spent five hours at the Met, and maybe saw 25% of the collection. You could spend many days here if you wanted to see everything!
Oh and the cafeteria was quite good!
As I said yesterday, the city is crazy popular this weekend and The Met was no exception. Amongst this crowd of art appreciators was an actual artist:
He was very good!
So what were our favourites? We were both big fans of the hyper-realistic oil paintings, such as this one by Jean Leon Gerome that was painted over 150 years ago:
The paintings are displayed in a way that let’s you get very close to them. In the piece above, we just couldn’t see brush strokes. It was a work of mind-boggling talent!
I also very much liked the decorative armour, including this piece that would look right at home on the pages of the manga Berserk:
But my absolute favourite was this piece, named Springtime:
I liked this so much I bought a poster of it and will frame it. The face of the girl stole my heart 😉
The Met is incredible. Go see it; you won’t be disappointed!