June 1, 2026
On my last day in New York City, I met A at Elbow Bread for one last strawberry lemon sheep's cheese Danish (my third one in three days), and then he went off to work and I was on my own.
I'm starting to feel a lot more confident in the city, and I was able to find my way via subway and walking to my next destination. The subway took me to the west side of Central Park, and then I walked through the park to the east side, passing by this deliightful bronze sculpture of Prospero and his daughter Miranda from Shakespeare's The Tempest, appropriately located in front of the theater that is home to the summer Shakespeare in the Park festival.
The Met has a permanent collection of 1.5 million works grouped in seventeen separate departments. I only had a few hours, so I decided to start in the European section and see how far I got from there.
Two very different sculptures in one of the main hallways are The Last Supper (ca. 1500-1530, Netherlandish artist unknown) and The Hand of God (1907) by Auguste Rodin, which shows Adam and Eve cradled in God's hand.
Close-up of The Last Supper:
I am a huge fan of the work of Gustav Klimt. On the left is Mäda Primavesi (1912-1913), a painting seized by the Nazis in 1938 as part of their campaign to rid the country of "degenerative art," and restored to the owner in 1951. On the right is Serena Pulitzer Lederer (1899), one of Klimt's early patrons. This painting was also seized by the Nazis in 1942 (clearly, they had it out for Klimt, who died in 1918) and returned to Serena's son in 1948.
I was excited to be at the Met for the first-ever comprehensive exhibition on Raphael in the United States, a show of 237 pieces of art and historic objects gathered from around the world and on display in the Met from March 29 to June 28.
Raphael lived from 1483 to 1520, just 37 years. He was younger than his famous peers Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Michelangelo (1475-1564). Raphael spent the last 12 years of his life in Rome painting at what seems like a rather frantic pace. Information on site notes that "the drawings, paintings, prints, and tapestries on view present a portrait of his dashing artistic personality and astonishingly creative mind." His output was incredible, including entire rooms at the Vatican that were not included in this retrospective for obvious reasons.
The exhibit was crowded, and I definitely needed more time than I had at my disposal, but I'll include just a few of my favorites here.
Left: The Colonna Altarpiece--Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints; God the Father and Two Angels (1504-1505)
Right: Detail. Note that the Christchild is clothed--rare for this time period.
When Raphael was just 17 years old, he was commissioned to paint an enormous altarpiece in Città di Castello. The altarpiece was destroyed by an earthquake in 1789, but this fragment, an angel, was saved.
Many of Raphael's drawings, which were studies for painted works, were on display. This is Composition Study for the Entombment (ca. 1507).
Raphael drew his inspiration from this marble relief and an ancient Roman sarcophagus that depicts the death of the Greek hero Meleager.
Left: The Virgin and Child (1508)
Right: Portrait of Baldassarre Castiglione (1514-1516). I like this description from the info placard: "Raphael's ability to balance truthfulness with flattery can be seen in the choice of a large, elegant hat placed in a way that obscures Castiglione's baldness."
Left: Portrait of Bindo Altovitti (ca. 1515-1516)--a banker painted as if he were a Greek god.
Right: Portrait of a Young Woman with a Unicorn (1505-1506: The unicorn--a symbol of chastity--and her ornate clothing and expensive jewelry indicates that this is a betrothal or marriage portrait.
Studies of the Heads of Three poets (Homer, an Unidentified Poet, and Dante) (ca. 1511-1512):
They are the three figures on the left in the Parnassus fresco in the Vatican.
A study for God the Father (ca. 1509-1511) in the Disputa fresco in the Vatican.
See the finished product at the top center of the painting below:
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Left: The Virgin and Child wiith Raphael, Tobias, and Saint Jerome, aka The Madonna of the Fish (ca. 1512-14) --Note the dead fish hanging from Tobias's hand. Tobias was an apocryphal figure who used fish parts to cure his father's blindness.
Right: The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John The Baptist, aka The Madonna of the Rose (1517-1518) -- Note the rose on the table near the Christ child's foot. I love the old, worried-looking Joseph who fades into the background.
Well, time to move on to other parts of the Met's European collection. This is Rouen Cathedral: The Portant (Sunlight) (1894). Monet painted the Rouen Cathedral at different times of day more than thirty times. It is a fascinating study of the effect of light and shadow.
I had just happened to notice these works on my way into the museum--the Rouen Cathedral series (1969) by Roy Lichtenstein, painted seventy-five years after Monet's version. It was really fun to make the connection between Monet and Lichtenstein!
It is amazing what Lichtenstein achieved with dots and a minimal palette.
Monet's Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies (1899) is responsible for me putting a return trip to France to include Giverny, where Monet owned property and created this waterlily garden, on my travel wish list.
I love Vincent van Gogh and was excited to see that the Met has several of his works. This is Woman Rocking a Cradle; Augustine-Alix Pellicot Roulin (1889). Augustine was the wife of the postmaster of Arles, whom van Gogh also painted. The rope in her hand is attached to a cradle that is not part of the painting. How about that awesome wallpaper!
Van Gogh was the master of movement, which he created with thick layers of paint. In Wheat Field with Cypresses (1889), everything seems to move--the sky, the trees, the wheat.
Another artist in my top ten has to be William Bouguereau, a contemporary of the Impressionists but certainly not one of them.
Left: One of my favorite paintings in the Met is Breton Brother and Sister (1871). Exquisite.
Right: Also beautiful is Young Mother Gazing at Her Child (1871).
The first time I saw The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer (1922 - cast) by Edgar Degas, I was pretty excited. This is an iconic sculpture I have seen in numerous books. However, I've now seen it multiple times in multiple locations. Each time the skirt is slightly different, but the bronze body is the same. I learned at the Met that the original was made in 1881 of wax tinted to look like flesh and is wearing a human hair wig. After Degas's death, at least twenty-eight bronze casts were made, which is why it shows up in lots of museums. The original is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
When I think of Auguste Rodin, I think of his iconic work The Thinker. I was surprised to see that this intense sculpture of St. John the Baptist (1878-1888) was by Rodin. I love the description on the information plaque: "The saint's gouged eyes, sunken cheeks, and touseled locks convey the spiritual ferocity with which he announces Christ's coming."
I also love Rodin's Adam and Eve sculptures (modeled 1880 or 1881, cast 1910) and these descriptions: "Adam is shown after his expulsion from paradise, his eyes staring blindly and his body staggered by the consequences of his sin."
"Eve is a physical manifesto of remorse; her body twisted in suffering, her face imprisoned within a gesture of anguish."
View of the sculpture gallery from above:
One of the second floor hallways had a great portrait series that included these two masterpieces.
Left:Scheveningen Fisherman (1932), Willem van den Berg
Right: Sharecropper (1952), Elizabeth Catlett
This is an interesting double-sided work. On one side is The Dormition of the Virgin, and on the other side is Christ Carrying the Cross (1510) by Hans Schäufelein. This is actually one of four wings of a folding triptych illustrating the Passion of Christ on one side and the Life of the Virgin on the other.
Wonderful, expressive faces, and a particularly unusual Christ:
This is Jan, First Count of Egmond (1516-20) and Magdalena, Countess of Egmond (1516-20), by an unknown Northern Netherlands artist. Don't they look like the sourpuss grandparents no kid wants to have?
This spectacular painting looks a lot like contemporary folk art to me. The expressive faces of all the ladies-in-waiting and of the queen herself, not to mention the detailed fabric patterns, are exquisite. It is hard for me to believe that Niccolò di Pietro painted St. Ursula and Her Maidens in 1410.
The information placard for Adoration of the Magi (c. 1510-20) enhanced my love for this piece: "A Christian gospel recounts that three magi (also called wise men or kings) travelled from distant lands to worship the newborn Jesus Christ. In this relief, the three kings remove their headdresses in succession and progress from standing to kneeling, venerating the holy infant."
One does not just give a casual glance and walk by a painting by Johannes Vermeer. There are only 34 in the whole world. Compare that to the 100-130 paintings by Raphael or the 300-340 paintings by Rembrandt. The Met actually owns FIVE paintings by Vermeer, the largest collection of Vermeer masterpieces of any museum in the world. I only saw two of the five: Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (1662) and Study of a Young Woman (c. 1665-1667). Maybe the other three were on loan to another museum.
Speaking of Rembrandt, here is one of his: The Standard Bearer (1654). It seems pretty unremarkable compared to the butterfly adorned hairdo of Diego Veláquez's portrait of Maria Teresa, Infanta of Spain (1651-54) who ended up marring her first cousin, Louis XIV, and became queen of France.
Here are two very different interpretations of Christ from two different centuries and continents.
Left: In Salvador Dali's Crucifixion - Corpus Hypercubus (1954), Christ's body levitating above the checkerboard floor bears no signs of torture and the crown of thorns and nails are missing. The woman at the bottom is Dali's wife, Gala.
Right: Christ Carrying the Cross, called "The Lord of the Fall" (ca. 1770-75) was painted in Cuzco, Peru, by an unknown artist. The figure of Christ is surrounded by feathered, flower-adorned angels typical of Andean sacred art.
Last but not least, this was one of only three or four pieces of American art I spent any time admiring on this visit to the Met. No paint was used to add detail to Autumn Landscape (1923); color and texture were created solely with glass
The Met was much more crowded when I left than when I arrived. It is heartening that there are so many people interested in visiting an art museum in a city that has at least 100 dedicated art museums (according to the internet).
My next challenge was to find my way back through Central Park to the subway station, catch the right train, pick up my suitcase at my hotel, then get an Uber to the airport. But first, I had to pass up purchasing "Frida Dog," fine art being sold by a street vendor. Yeah, not really tempting.
When I walked past this mural of Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna on Eldridge Street, painted in 2020 after they were killed in a helicopter crash, I knew I was close to the hotel and had actually made my way all around NYC all by myself.
Goodbye, New York City. I'll be back--again and again, I hope!
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