THE RANGE, QUALITY and quantity of the nineteenth-century collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, have long been recognised as without parallel, above all for its holdings of French art. Although Paris has many of the cardinal masterpieces – by Ingres, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, for example – the century is represented fragmentarily through several museums and, with a few exceptions, non-French painting is hardly visible. While the Metropolitan is dominated by the art of France as the great autoroute of innovation and achievement in that century, it is now able, through recent acquisitions, increased space and departmental changes, to integrate more works from other European schools as well as to include some American paintings in its display. Last December the Museum unveiled the expanded suite of rooms on the second floor.1 Its new nineteenth-century hang takes the visitor from Goya and French Neo-classicism through to the early twentieth century where Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein – an American depicted by a Spaniard – broods supreme over the polyglot Ecole de Paris.
This is the third reconfiguration in nearly thirty years of this part of the Metropolitan’s collection. In 1980 the open-plan André Meyer Galleries were inaugurated with their unadorned jigsaw of taller and shorter screens, excellent for looking at individual works but less good for imparting a sense of overall coherence. The ‘modernist’ setting was not widely liked; the screens were not as flexible as had been intended (in fact none was ever moved); and there was little room for the growth of the collection. In 1993 these were replaced by twenty-one rooms in an elaborate but somewhat watered-down Beaux-Arts style – comfortable spaces conducive to a monographic hang as befitted a Museum by then rich in its holdings of individual artists such as Courbet, Manet, Degas and Cézanne. The hang was certainly imposing, even if a little decorous and even-handed. Since then, among many additions to the collection, has come the superlative bequest of Walter Annenberg after his death in 2002. Two years later a curatorial restructuring was announced. The old department of Nineteenth-Century European Paintings was subsumed within a much larger Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern and Contemporary Art. Apart from painting and sculpture, this includes works on paper, the decorative arts and design.
A re-hang was also necessitated by the addition of nine new rooms – the H.J. Heinz II Galleries – seamlessly built at the south side of the Museum above the Oceanic and African galleries. This has increased the floor space to just under 35,000 square feet. At the same time the long Gerald Cantor Sculpture Gallery, through which a visitor approaches the collection, has been simplified and aerated (it is a relief to learn that a number of Salon paintings have found only a temporary home here, for they are low company for Rodin whose work dominates the space). From skirting to cornice the rooms have been redecorated in subdued, warm colours ranging from dark red and aubergine to grey/green and stone, the colours alternating between wall and generous wainscoting. The expansion provides space for a considerable number of works that were in storage and for the eloquent incorporation of, for example, the Annenberg bequest of paintings which includes, among others, Manet’s scintillating profile of his wife in the garden, Cézanne’s monolithic Seated peasant and the early Picasso At the Lapin Agile. Notable innovations are headed by four close-hung and absorbing smaller rooms devoted to the plein-air oil-sketch in early nineteenth-century Europe. Here you can find, for example, two small landscapes by Carl Gustav Carus, the close friend of Friedrich, which came to the Museum last year in the Eugene Thaw gift. Nearby no-one should miss the exquisite Bonington of trees in the environs of Rouen (acquired 2001) or overlook the Roman views by J.-C.-J. Rémond and the Belgian painter Simon Denis (both from the promised gift of Wheelock Whitney III). New to the display are portraits by Whistler,Sargent and Eakins (it will be a shame if these works have to be returned to their legitimate home in the American galleries, currently being renovated); an Orientalist hot-house; a sampling of early twentieth-century British painting; and surprises such as Repin’s intense portrait of the Russian writer Garshin (see Fig.74, p.219) and Henry Lerolle’s newly cleaned Organ rehearsal into which a figure from Seurat has strayed. Such works add counterpoint to the rooms given over to individual artists, a series of mini-retrospectives dotted with some of the most celebrated paintings of the period. This especially applies to the work of Degas as painter and sculptor, a collection built on the great bequest of Louisine Havemeyer. A strength of the display is its ability to revive palates perhaps jaded with the sight of walls of Monet or Van Gogh; their representation here is gripping. Only in the last rooms, the pace quickening into the early twentieth century, does the display occasionally falter: a 1933 Bonnard and a 1939 Braque, however superb, are cuckoos in the nest.
The new hang is informative without being didactic; there are no schoolroom pauses or banal thematic juxtapositions; the paintings sink or swim. To be sure, there are threadbare patches, and the Francophile taste of many of the Museum’s greatest benefactors has inevitably pushed to the wings the Nazarenes, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Symbolists. If the Metropolitan’s account of the evolution of ‘modernist’ painting ruffles no feathers nor challenges the comfort zone of the old history, the abundance and quality of the works on view deepens one’s sense of the mutations of every decade and sharpens one’s understanding of each contributor to that astonishing century.

The new hang is informative without being didactic; there are no schoolroom pauses or banal thematic juxtapositions; the paintings sink or swim. To be sure, there are threadbare patches, and the Francophile taste of many of the Museum’s greatest benefactors has inevitably pushed to the wings the Nazarenes, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Symbolists. If the Metropolitan’s account of the evolution of ‘modernist’ painting ruffles no feathers nor challenges the comfort zone of the old history, the abundance and quality of the works on view deepens one’s sense of the mutations of every decade and sharpens one’s understanding of each contributor to that astonishing century.