The Metropolitan Museum of Art has contributed more than 10,000 images of its permanent collection to the Artstor Digital Library. The vast museum includes more than 2 million works of art, spanning 5,000 years of world culture, from prehistory to the present day. The selection in Artstor encompasses the museum’s holdings from ancient works through to contemporary, across media and across the globe.

When the museum first opened in 1872, it was housed in a townhouse located on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The collection was founded with 174 European paintings. Today the comprehensive collections are shared by 17 diverse curatorial departments, and the main building, incorporating successive generations of expansions, occupies more than 2 million square feet. The original commissioned home for the museum, the Gothic Revival-style building designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mold, opened in 1880, and remains at the core of the many subsequent extensions.

In addition to housing and exhibiting it’s extraordinary permanent collection, the museum generates and hosts a diverse program of exhibitions annually, welcoming millions of visitors.

The museum also includes a department of medieval art at The Met Cloisters.

For related collections in Artstor, see:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Brooklyn Museum Costumes
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: William Keighley
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Exhibition Installation Photographs

And the public collection at: The Metropolitan Museum of Art