The American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The first acquisitions in American Art were made almost immediately after the Museum was founded at the end of the nineteenth century. When they opened in October 1924, The American Wing’s dedicated space included sixteen period rooms, three exhibition galleries, and several alcoves and caused a sensation. A unique arrangement at the time, American antiques were presented in an orderly, chronological way. In the period rooms, furniture, silver, paintings, glass and other objects of more or less the same date were arranged together in spaces whose wood- and plasterwork were also of that date. As the Museum grew through the years in size and importance its holdings in American art grew in proportion. To accommodate its ever-increasing wealth of material and popularity, The American Wing underwent new construction to enlarge the galleries in the mid-1980s, directed by the design firm of Kevin Roche John Dinkaloo and Associates.

The 1980s incarnation of the American Wing embodied colonial home life and early Federal America by encompassing a wide-range of American art with sophisticated taste and variety of materials. Little and big treasures of American history are photographed and discussed in this book in order to celebrate the vitality and richness of American heritage. Masterpieces of painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, interior and exterior architecture, furniture, and other decorative arts are illustrated and explained in terms of their style, quality, and historical interest; it is not just a tour of the galleries, but of the collection as a whole, including objects not necessarily on display. The Museum's large selection of outstanding and typical examples provides a fair opportunity to judge the true nature of our rich and distinctive artistic heritage. [This book was originally published in 1985 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]