The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Which Parts Are Worth Your Time

A visitor who spent 30 seconds looking at each displayed object in the Metropolitan Museum would need 33 hours to see everything. The Met has approximately 400,000 objects on display at any given time across 17 departments. This is not a situation where a strong morning covers the essentials. The practical question for a first or second visit is which areas to actually prioritise rather than which areas to technically pass through.

Admission is $30 for non-New York State residents. The ticket is valid for three consecutive days and also covers same-day entry to The Cloisters in northern Manhattan. That’s value.

The Temple of Dendur

The Egyptian collection on the first floor is the largest Egyptian collection outside Cairo. The centrepiece - the entire Temple of Dendur, a 2,000-year-old Roman-period temple transported stone by stone from Aswan before the High Dam submerged it, reassembled in a purpose-built glass wing - stops most first-time visitors cold. Augustus Caesar ordered this temple built in 15 BC; Egyptian priests officiated in it for 200 years. Now it stands in New York with Central Park visible through the windows behind it. The juxtaposition is genuinely disorienting. The gallery also contains Old Kingdom tomb chapels reassembled so visitors can walk through them, and one of the largest collections of funerary objects in any American museum. Allow 90 minutes.

European Paintings

The second floor European galleries from Italian primitives through the Impressionists contain work that would constitute the entire permanent collection of a smaller world-class museum. Vermeer’s Woman with a Lute and Young Woman with a Water Pitcher are in Gallery 632. Rembrandt’s self-portraits are in Gallery 636. The El Greco gallery has five substantial works including the enormous View of Toledo. Monet’s Haystacks series and significant canvases by Renoir, Degas, Manet, and Cézanne fill the Impressionist section. The Velazquez portrait of Juan de Pareja in Gallery 616 is considered one of the finest Spanish Baroque paintings in North America; it’s easy to walk past on the way to the Impressionists. Give yourself 2-3 hours and accept that you will miss significant things.

The Arms and Armor Galleries

The Arms and Armor galleries are consistently underrated. The European armour collection includes complete equestrian armour displayed on horseback - standing beside a 16th-century German destrier in full plate armour, at horse-height, produces a specific kind of scale shock. The five complete equestrian armours from German and Italian workshops arranged together in the Princes’ Tournament hall are worth seeking out. The Japanese armour section is equally impressive.

American Wing

The American Wing’s period rooms - complete reconstructed domestic interiors from the 17th to 19th centuries, pulled from demolished buildings and reinstalled intact - are the aspect most visitors don’t anticipate and most find genuinely affecting. The Frank Lloyd Wright room from a 1912 Minnesota house is one of the few accessible Prairie Style interiors anywhere. Emmanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) is here: 3.8 by 6.5 metres, better in person than in any reproduction.

The Roof Garden

May through late October, the roof garden is open with a commissioned installation and the best view of Central Park from a public vantage point in Manhattan. Free with admission. Friday and Saturday evening sessions (17:00-21:00) are significantly less crowded than weekend afternoons.

The Cloisters

The Met’s medieval branch in Tryon Park (same-day ticket, A train to 190th Street) was assembled from five actual French monastic cloister sections transported stone by stone in the 1930s. The Unicorn Tapestries - seven large Flemish works from circa 1500, vivid colour, extraordinary condition - are here. Consistently less crowded than the main building.

Café Sabarsky at the Neue Galerie, two blocks south on Fifth Avenue, is the best lunch option in the immediate neighbourhood: Viennese coffeehouse, serious pastry, good coffee. Book ahead.