The Met Opens Its Doors in New York

On February 20, 1872, New York's grandest new cultural experiment began in an unlikely setting: the Dodworth Building at 681 Fifth Avenue, a former private residence and dance academy that the trustees of the fledgling Metropolitan Museum of Art had leased for $9,000 a year. The museum had been chartered by the New York legislature in 1870 with an ambitious mission — to bring art and art education to the American people — and now, two years later, it finally had something tangible to show.

That first exhibition was modest by today's standards: a Roman stone sarcophagus and 174 mostly European paintings, the "Purchase of 1871" that formed the nucleus of the collection. But the opening reception was a triumph. Museum president John Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive whose own art collection had helped seed the institution, wrote a delighted account afterward: "We had a fine turnout of ladies and gentlemen and all were highly pleased. The pictures looked splendid, and compliments were so plenty and strong that I was afraid the mouths of the Trustees would become chronically and permanently fixed in a broad grin."

He added, with satisfaction, "We may now consider the Museum fairly launched and under favorable auspices."

The evening was enough of an event to make the illustrated press: Frank Leslie's Weekly published a wood engraving of the crowded picture gallery the following month, showing New York society taking in the new museum's first hang. What they saw were mostly European old masters — Dutch, Flemish, Italian, and Spanish paintings bought as a group in 1871 to give the young institution an instant collection.

The founders — Johnston, publisher George Palmer Putnam, artists Eastman Johnson and Frederic Edwin Church, and a circle of industrialists and civic leaders — had aimed high from the start: a world-class institution in New York to rival the great museums of Europe. The collection quickly outgrew its first two homes, moving to a mansion on 14th Street in 1873 and then to its grand building in Central Park in 1880. Its first director, Civil War veteran Luigi Palma di Cesnola, took charge in 1879 and steered the Met's growth for 25 years.

Today the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest art museum in the United States, with more than two million works spanning 5,000 years — from Egyptian temples to American fashion — drawing millions of visitors a year to that same stretch of Fifth Avenue. All of it began with 174 paintings in a rented dance hall.

Photo: Arad, CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).