Image: Opening reception for NYC's Metropolitan Museum in 1872.
From Unmaking the Met by James Panero. On the past, present, and future of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Met set out to be “worthy of this great metropolis and of the wide empire of which New York is the commercial center,” the civic leader William Cullen Bryant declared at its inception. Through a history of dedicated leadership, dutiful scholarship, and astonishing private beneficence, such ambitions have been more than realized.