European Art - The Robert Lehman Collection

The Robert Lehman Collection—one of the most extraordinary private art collections ever assembled in the United States—was presented to the Metropolitan Museum by the Robert Lehman Foundation in 1969, following Mr. Lehman's death. The collection of nearly three thousand works of art, which had been assembled by Mr. Lehman, a longtime Museum trustee, and by his father, Philip, is housed today in The Robert Lehman Wing. The galleries, which opened to the public in 1975, were designed to evoke the ambience of Lehman's own house on West 54th Street in New York City, with wall fabrics, draperies, furniture, and rugs that set the objects in an intimate, personal context.

Thanks to Lehman's acute connoisseurship and adroit negotiation of the art market, the collection is extremely strong in several areas of European art. Its approximately three hundred paintings favor the Italian Renaissance, especially the Sienese school, and the early northern masters, but range as far afield as the Fauves and beyond. Its more than seven hundred Old Master drawings include a rich trove of eighteenth-century Venetian works as well as other important Italian, French, and northern examples. The remaining two thousand objects in many media in the collection fall into the category of decorative arts; the concentrations of Venetian glass and Renaissance majolica are particularly noteworthy.