The Robert Lehman Collection

The Robert Lehman Collection is one of the most extraordinary bequests ever made to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Assembled over decades by banker and financier Robert Lehman, building on the foundation his father, Philip Lehman, had started, the collection encompasses more than 3,000 works spanning European painting, drawing, decorative arts, textiles, and Renaissance maiolica, glass, and enamels. It's especially prized for its old master paintings, including works by Botticelli, El Greco, Rembrandt, and Goya, alongside a remarkable group of Sienese and Florentine early Renaissance panels. There are also strong holdings of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works by artists like Ingres, Renoir, Cézanne, and Bonnard. Upon Lehman's death in 1969, the collection was left to the Met on the condition that it be housed and displayed as a distinct, unified entity rather than dispersed among the museum's other departments. To honor that stipulation, the Met built the Robert Lehman Wing, which opened in 1975, designed to evoke the atmosphere of the Lehman family's actual Manhattan townhouse rather than a conventional museum gallery. The wing includes recreated period rooms with damask-covered walls, ornate fireplaces, and richly appointed interiors that give visitors a sense of how the art was originally experienced in a private domestic setting. The collection remains a beloved fixture of the Met's holdings, prized both for the quality of individual masterworks and for the unique curatorial experiment it represents: an intact, personal art collection preserved within the walls of a major encyclopedic museum.