Rogues' Gallery Part 1

Rogues' gallery.

The secret story of the l.u.s.t, lies, greed, and betrayals that made the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

by Michael Gross.

Introduction.

ON A CHILLY WINTER DAY, EARLY IN 2006, I SAT IN THE OFFICE SAT IN THE OFFICE of Philippe de Montebello, then director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (he would announce his retirement two years later). Montebello is generally considered, even by his most fervent admirers, a little arrogant, a touch on the pompous side, and his mid-Atlantic Voice of G.o.d (well-known from his Acoustiguide tours of exhibitions) does nothing to dispel the impression of a healthy self-regard. So I was nervous; I was there to discuss my plan to write an unauthorized book about the museum and to ask for his support, or at least his neutrality. of Philippe de Montebello, then director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (he would announce his retirement two years later). Montebello is generally considered, even by his most fervent admirers, a little arrogant, a touch on the pompous side, and his mid-Atlantic Voice of G.o.d (well-known from his Acoustiguide tours of exhibitions) does nothing to dispel the impression of a healthy self-regard. So I was nervous; I was there to discuss my plan to write an unauthorized book about the museum and to ask for his support, or at least his neutrality.

He wasn't happy to see me.

My brief conversation with the museum administration, then racing to an abrupt conclusion, had actually begun in the fall of 2005, when I called Harold Holzer, the senior vice president for external affairs, and told him my plans. His reaction was quick and negative.

"n.o.body here is ever of a mind" to cooperate with an author, he said. "The only kind of books we find even vaguely palatable are those we control." Nonetheless, the museum had just "broken precedent" to cooperate with another author writing about the museum. It was "vaguely palatable" because it was "a controlled ent.i.ty." Once it was published, I'd see there was no point in my writing another. "If we tell you we won't cooperate, will you go away?"

Until now, there have been only two kinds of books on the museum. Some have had agendas, whether personal (the former Met director Thomas Hoving's memoir, Making the Mummies Dance Making the Mummies Dance, was a score-settling romp; John L. Hess covered Hoving as a journalist for the New York Times New York Times, came to hate him, and explained why in The Grand Acquisitors) The Grand Acquisitors) or political (Debora Silverman disdained the upper cla.s.ses of the 1980s, the way they disregarded history and merchandised high culture, and explained why in or political (Debora Silverman disdained the upper cla.s.ses of the 1980s, the way they disregarded history and merchandised high culture, and explained why in Selling Culture: Bloomingdale's, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan's America) Selling Culture: Bloomingdale's, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan's America).

The other kind of Met book was commissioned, authorized, published, or otherwise sanctioned by the museum. The first among those, appearing in two volumes in 1913 and 1946, was by Winifred E. Howe, the museum's publications editor and in-house historian. They are, to be kind, dutiful. Two later, somewhat juicier histories were commissioned by Hoving and published to coincide with the museum's 1970 centennial, one a coffee-table book called The Museum The Museum by the late Conde Nast magazine writer Leo Lerman, the other, by the late Conde Nast magazine writer Leo Lerman, the other, Merchants and Masterpieces Merchants and Masterpieces, a narrative history by Calvin Tomkins, a writer for The New Yorker The New Yorker. Though Merchants Merchants is an "independent view of the museum's history," as Tomkins wrote in his acknowledgments, the book was conceived by and for the museum, he used museum-paid researchers, and he submitted his ma.n.u.script to museum officials for comment. is an "independent view of the museum's history," as Tomkins wrote in his acknowledgments, the book was conceived by and for the museum, he used museum-paid researchers, and he submitted his ma.n.u.script to museum officials for comment.

Danny Danziger, author of the 2007 book Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the one I was supposed to wait for), had changes forced on him. Early that year Viking Press distributed advance proofs of the book, made up of a series of edited interviews with museum employees, friends, and trustees, which was to be published that May. But then (the one I was supposed to wait for), had changes forced on him. Early that year Viking Press distributed advance proofs of the book, made up of a series of edited interviews with museum employees, friends, and trustees, which was to be published that May. But then Museum Museum didn't appear as scheduled. What did was a brief didn't appear as scheduled. What did was a brief New York New York magazine article revealing that it had been delayed so it could be expurgated. magazine article revealing that it had been delayed so it could be expurgated.

The publisher said the changes were "run-of-the-mill," and Harold Holzer said they were "a matter of fact-checking," with no "wild-eyed running around to get things changed."1 But a side-by-side comparison of the proofs with the book that was finally published suggests that a few of the Met's most powerful demanded and won changes. Cutting remarks made by the vice chairman Annette de la Renta, a list of paintings owned by the trustee Henry Kravis, and an entire section on the trustee emerita Jayne Wrightsman all vanished. And their words aren't the only ones that the museum has tried to erase. Simultaneously, But a side-by-side comparison of the proofs with the book that was finally published suggests that a few of the Met's most powerful demanded and won changes. Cutting remarks made by the vice chairman Annette de la Renta, a list of paintings owned by the trustee Henry Kravis, and an entire section on the trustee emerita Jayne Wrightsman all vanished. And their words aren't the only ones that the museum has tried to erase. Simultaneously, The Clarks of Cooperstown The Clarks of Cooperstown by Nicholas Fox Weber, a book about the family that produced two of America's greatest modern art collectors, Stephen and Sterling Clark, the former another Met trustee, was banned from the museum's bookshop, even though it had been rushed into print to coincide with a Met exhibition of the Clark brothers' collections and the museum promised to "aggressively sell the book in its stores." by Nicholas Fox Weber, a book about the family that produced two of America's greatest modern art collectors, Stephen and Sterling Clark, the former another Met trustee, was banned from the museum's bookshop, even though it had been rushed into print to coincide with a Met exhibition of the Clark brothers' collections and the museum promised to "aggressively sell the book in its stores." Publishers Weekly Publishers Weekly noted that the book portrayed Alfred Clark (Stephen and Sterling's father) as leading a double h.o.m.os.e.xual life, and mentioned Sterling Clark's involvement in a plot to overthrow FDR. noted that the book portrayed Alfred Clark (Stephen and Sterling's father) as leading a double h.o.m.os.e.xual life, and mentioned Sterling Clark's involvement in a plot to overthrow FDR.

Ever since its founding, the Metropolitan has bred arrogance, hauteur, hubris, vanity, and even madness in those who live in proximity to its mult.i.tude of treasures and who have come to feel not just protective but possessive of them. "Being involved with it made you special to the outside world," says Stuart Silver, for years the museum's chief exhibition designer. "It was a narcotic. You were high all the time."

The Metropolitan is more than a mere drug, though. It is a huge alchemical experiment, turning the worst of man's attributes-extravagance, l.u.s.t, gluttony, acquisitiveness, envy, avarice, greed, egotism, and pride-into the very best, trans.m.u.ting deadly sins into priceless treasure. So the museum must be seen as something separate from the often-imperfect individuals who created it, who sustained it, and who run it today, something greater than the sum of their myriad flaws.

Without taking anything away from the Louvre or the Orsay in Paris, Madrid's Prado, St. Petersburg's Hermitage, the British Museum (which has no pictures), Britain's National Gallery (which has only pictures and sculpture), the Vatican in Rome, the Uffizi in Florence, Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Art Inst.i.tute of Chicago, Berlin's Pergamon, Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Getty in Malibu, or other vital New York museums like the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan is simply (and at the same time not at all simply) the most encyclopedic, universal art museum in the world.

In Montebello's office that day, he'd been slumped sullenly in his chair as I made my pitch, but straightened up defensively as I finished. "You are laboring under a misimpression," he told me. "The museum has no secrets."

ITS SCOPE IS MIND-BOGGLING. THE M METROPOLITAN M MUSEUM OF A ART is a repository for more than two million art objects created over the course of five thousand years. Its more than two million square feet occupying thirteen acres of New York's Central Park, and encompa.s.sing power and fire stations, an infirmary, and an armory with a forge, make it the largest museum in the Western Hemisphere. is a repository for more than two million art objects created over the course of five thousand years. Its more than two million square feet occupying thirteen acres of New York's Central Park, and encompa.s.sing power and fire stations, an infirmary, and an armory with a forge, make it the largest museum in the Western Hemisphere.

The Met portrays itself as a collection of separate but integrated museums, "each of which ranks in its category among the finest in the world." Its seventeen curatorial departments cover the waterfront of artistic creation: separate staffs are dedicated to American, Asian, Islamic, Egyptian, medieval, Greek and Roman, ancient Near Eastern, and what was once known as primitive art but is now described with the more politically correct name Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. European art is so vast it gets two departments, one for paintings, another for sculpture and decorative objects. Additional departments are devoted to arms and armor, costumes (which includes both high fas.h.i.+on and everyday clothing), drawings and prints, musical instruments, and photographs. Modern art has its own curatorial department and is housed in its own wing.

The collections are almost all contained in a building that has grown in fits and starts since it first opened in 1880 to contain the then-ten-year-old museum. In the years since, it has nearly filled the five-block-long plot of Central Park set aside for it by the New York State legislature in 1871. The first redbrick Gothic Revival building, which opened into Central Park, was designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, the park's structural architect, and was leased, rent-and real-estate-tax-free, in perpetuity to the museum's trustees by New York City, appropriately enough on Christmas Eve 1878. That first structure has since been almost entirely enveloped by additions. Only a few hints of the redbrick original remain, a bit of its southern facade and the undersides of staircases.

Today's imperial neocla.s.sical facade and entrance opened on Fifth Avenue in 1926; they were conceived by Richard Morris Hunt, one of the founding trustees. Hunt not only designed the museum's familiar face; he also created its first comprehensive master plan, but wouldn't live to see the only part of his plan that was fully realized, the monumental Great Hall through which most visitors enter.

The famous firm of McKim, Mead & White signed on two years later to complete Hunt's unfinished business. Over the next quarter century, their work resulted in the opening of a new library in 1910 and northern and southern wings through the following decade, and after an interregnum for war, into 1926. Yet another wing was posthumously named for John Pierpont Morgan, the industrial-era financier. Morgan served first as a trustee and then as the museum's president from 1904 until his death in 1913. The Morgan Wing, which now contains the popular arms and armor collection, opened in 1910 as a home to the museum's decorative arts collection.

The American Wing, built onto the museum's northwest corner in 1924, was inspired and paid for by its then president Robert de Forest, the museum's first great champion of American art. His wing grew further in 1931 with the addition of the Van Rensselaer period room, the grand entrance hall of a manor house built near Albany, New York, in the 1760s. The museum itself would later call the wing "awkwardly placed" and that period room a "haphazard appendage."2 Later in that decade, a more successful appendage, the Cloisters, a branch of the museum dedicated to medieval art and architecture, opened about seven miles away in Fort Tryon Park at the northern tip of Manhattan, paid for in its entirety by John D. Rockefeller Jr., who, though he never joined the board of trustees, was as decisive a force in the museum's history as Morgan. Later in that decade, a more successful appendage, the Cloisters, a branch of the museum dedicated to medieval art and architecture, opened about seven miles away in Fort Tryon Park at the northern tip of Manhattan, paid for in its entirety by John D. Rockefeller Jr., who, though he never joined the board of trustees, was as decisive a force in the museum's history as Morgan.

During World War II, the Metropolitan's fifth chief, Francis Henry Taylor, who created the model of director as populist, reconceived the museum as a collection of smaller ones defined by civilizations and cultures, and started planning to modernize and expand the building. He managed to build a gallery connecting the Morgan Wing to the Fifth Avenue building, but frustrated in turn by war, financial shortfalls, the Whitney Museum of American Art, which briefly toyed with a merger with the Metropolitan, and a hidebound board of trustees, an exhausted Taylor produced no more buildings before he quit his job in 1955. His successor, a medievalist named James Rorimer who'd befriended Rockefeller, shouldered the burden of modernization but got little credit, as upgrading electricity, lighting, and air-conditioning was hardly as glamorous as erecting new brick and mortar.

In September 1967, after New York City, long at odds with the museum, refused to pay for any new buildings until a comprehensive master plan was created, Tom Hoving commissioned one from the young firm of Kevin Roche John d.i.n.keloo and a.s.sociates. Unveiled in 1970 during the museum's eighteen-month centennial celebration, it proved to be as controversial as it was ambitious. Roche's park-side wings (the Temple of Dendur on the north, the modern and European art galleries and Lehman pavilion to the west, and the Michael Rockefeller primitive art wing on the south), all wrapped in gla.s.s and limestone, weren't completed until 1992; the interior the plan envisioned was finally finished fifteen years later with the restoration of the Greek and Roman galleries in the museum's southeast corner, where they had been before Taylor replaced them with a restaurant.

By that time, work had already begun on the next great museum expansion, this one created by the Montebello regime and dubbed the Twenty-first Century Met. Hemmed in by the promise the museum was forced to make to the city to win approval for the Roche expansion-which forever set the building's outer limits-it has ever since engaged in what it calls "building-from-within," revamping underused areas, turning air shafts and empty s.p.a.ce into exhibition galleries and offices, and even excavating beneath the building, as it was doing beneath the Charles Engelhard Court as this book was being written. The story of the Metropolitan's ceaseless expansion is as fascinating as that of the evolution of its collections and of the cast of characters that created and sustains it all.

VISITED BY ABOUT 4.6 MILLION PEOPLE A YEAR, MORE THAN A third of them from other countries, the Metropolitan styles itself the premier tourist attraction in New York City. More than a mere museum, it is also a food and drink purveyor in its employee and public cafeterias and six other dining venues (the Petrie Court Cafe, the Trustees Dining Room for members only, the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden Cafe, the Great Hall Balcony Bar, and an under-construction cafe in the latest iteration of the American Wing). It is a concert and lecture hall, a catering facility and event s.p.a.ce, a vast retail and wholesale operation (with thirteen separate shops inside the main museum and another thirty-nine around the world), a scholarly center and library, an educational resource offering worldwide tours and travel programs, lectures, symposia, films, and workshops (20,773 events in all in the year ending June 30, 2006, that attracted 830,607 people), as well as reference services, apprentice and fellows.h.i.+p programs, and a publis.h.i.+ng house employing some two thousand people. third of them from other countries, the Metropolitan styles itself the premier tourist attraction in New York City. More than a mere museum, it is also a food and drink purveyor in its employee and public cafeterias and six other dining venues (the Petrie Court Cafe, the Trustees Dining Room for members only, the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden Cafe, the Great Hall Balcony Bar, and an under-construction cafe in the latest iteration of the American Wing). It is a concert and lecture hall, a catering facility and event s.p.a.ce, a vast retail and wholesale operation (with thirteen separate shops inside the main museum and another thirty-nine around the world), a scholarly center and library, an educational resource offering worldwide tours and travel programs, lectures, symposia, films, and workshops (20,773 events in all in the year ending June 30, 2006, that attracted 830,607 people), as well as reference services, apprentice and fellows.h.i.+p programs, and a publis.h.i.+ng house employing some two thousand people.

Less tangibly, it is a repository of desire, and not just for the art objects on display. Unlike its peers in Paris, Madrid, and St. Petersburg, and countless other museums around the world, the Metropolitan was started from scratch by self-made men rather than springing full-blown from a n.o.ble collection. Yet acceptance by the museum-whether as an employee, a scholar, a donor, a trader or seller of art, a member of one of its many groups and committees, or, best of all, a member of its ruling board of trustees-is a version of enn.o.blement, the ultimate affirmation of success, material and d'estime d'estime that our democracy has to offer. that our democracy has to offer.

The museum repays its supporters with social prestige and affirmation of their cultivation. Of course, what you get depends on what you give. And the price is always rising. A seat on the board of trustees will set you back in excess of $10 million. The price of being a benefactor, which chisels your name into the marble plaques beside its Great Hall staircase, is $2.5 million. There are only 267 living benefactors. But for a mere $95 annual members.h.i.+p (up from $10 in 1880), almost anyone can get free admission, use of the Trustees Dining Room in summertime (when the trustees are mostly out of town), a couple of exhibition previews and magazines, and a 10 percent discount at the Met Store. And $65 of that is tax deductible.

In the American social firmament, the Metropolitan looms as more than a museum. "In the status-driven world of upper-income New York," the New York Times New York Times has said, "one sure route to social stardom is a seat on the board of a prominent arts inst.i.tution. A savvy player will aim for the top: the Metropolitan Museum of Art." has said, "one sure route to social stardom is a seat on the board of a prominent arts inst.i.tution. A savvy player will aim for the top: the Metropolitan Museum of Art."

"No club, church, philanthropy, or fraternal order in New York enjoys quite the same prominence or confers quite the same radiant status," New York New York magazine agreed. magazine agreed.

"Sitting on its board is arrival reaffirmed, the ultimate compliment from the ultimate peers," wrote the social observer David Patrick Columbia. The art dealer Richard Feigen has called the board of the Met "the most exclusive club in the world." But Feigen has also compared the museum to a nice girl "who just once in a while goes out and turns tricks for pocket change."3 And in recent years, as costs have escalated and government support of the arts has shrunk, she's grown promiscuous, creating councils and committees, stepping out with big corporations, even tying her fortunes to fas.h.i.+on magazines, all for one purpose: to generate cash. And in recent years, as costs have escalated and government support of the arts has shrunk, she's grown promiscuous, creating councils and committees, stepping out with big corporations, even tying her fortunes to fas.h.i.+on magazines, all for one purpose: to generate cash.

The Met offers members.h.i.+ps ranging from $50 national a.s.sociates, who live outside New York (there were 42,167 in 2007), to annual fellows in the President's Circle, 25 in all, paying $20,000 a year for members.h.i.+p. There are dozens of ways to get your name in the back of the annual report. You can donate to the annual appeal to members; join the President's Circle or the Patron Circle; make your company a corporate patron; sponsor an exhibition like Balenciaga, Conde Nast, and Party Rental Ltd. all did in 2007; donate art or funds to acquire art; make plans for a charitable annuity; join the Pooled Income Fund or a Friends Group (the Alfred Stieglitz Society, Amati, and Philodoroi, the Friends of the various curatorial departments, the Friends of Concerts and Lectures, of Inanna, of Isis, of the Thomas J. Watson Library); become a William Cullen Bryant Fellow; give a memorial gift; donate to the Christmas Tree Fund or the Fund for the Met ($5 million or more gets you top billing); or join the Chairman's Council, the Met Family Circle, the Apollo Circle for young donors in training, the Real Estate Council, the Professional Advisory Council, the Multicultural Audience Development Advisory Committee, or one of the visiting committees, where devotees of one department or another get to rub shoulders and share special privileges with curators and trustees. All it takes is interest, and the willingness to cough up coin.

In America, state-owned museums are the exception, and most, though founded by public-spirited citizens, were nurtured in the soil of private enterprise and live in a complex environment, "expected to be as costeffective as a business while serving as an educational resource, a civic inst.i.tution and a community partner-usually on the same day," the museographer Marjorie Schwarzer wrote. Like Feigen's well-bred wh.o.r.e, "the contemporary museum has had to embrace some apparent contradictions as it attempts to define itself for its many publics: being a charitable nonprofit organization in a marketplace culture, being a place of memory, reflection and learning in a nation that stresses action and immediacy, being a champion of tradition in a land of ceaseless innovation."

The Metropolitan occupies a state-owned building sitting on public land; has its heat and light bills, about half the costs of maintenance and security, and many capital expenditures paid for by New York City; receives direct grants of taxpayer dollars from local, state, and national governments; and for most of its existence has indirectly benefited from laws that allow, and even incentivize, private financial support in exchange for generous tax deductions. So it is clearly a public inst.i.tution. But even though New York State has statutory authority to supervise the a.s.sets of charities-a vague but powerful standard-over the years the Met's board has considered itself beholden to no one. It has functioned as a private society.

In the Metropolitan's early days, that meant its wealthy and powerful trustees took a straightforward att.i.tude of "the public be d.a.m.ned," closing the museum on Sundays, for instance, even though it was the only day that the working cla.s.s had free for leisure pursuits (and even though the trustees would sometimes unlock the place, Sabbath notwithstanding, for themselves and their friends). Over the years, that arrogance has been toned down, but it has never been entirely abandoned. Today the museum shames visitors into paying a $20 admission fee, even though its lease says it must be open free five days and two nights a week and its own official policy is that anyone can enter for a contribution of as little as a penny. And although it promised, as part of the 1971 agreement with the city that implemented the Hoving master plan, to create open and direct access to the building from Central Park through two courtyards, those entrances, now named the Carroll and Milton Petrie European Sculpture Court and the Charles Engelhard Court, remain shuttered to this day.

Some neighbors argue that Philippe de Montebello's building-from-within policy also violates the museum's 1971 agreement by altering the three-dimensional silhouette of the building, which they consider sacrosanct. One protesting group, the Metropolitan Museum Historic District Coalition, was recently able to stop a plan to excavate more s.p.a.ce beneath the museum's front ap.r.o.n, its fountains, and Fifth Avenue. Some residents of apartment houses across Fifth Avenue suspect that the museum is still up to something underground, pointing to cracked foundations as evidence.

THE M METROPOLITAN M MUSEUM IS A NOT-FOR-PROFIT PARTNERs.h.i.+P between the city of New York and the museum's trustees. While the charitable corporation owns the art in the museum, some argue that it really holds its treasures in "trust," as first defined by the courts of fifteenth-century England. "The board doesn't own the art; it simply manages the corporation," says Ronald D. Spencer, an art law specialist. "The corporation functions as a caretaker for the public," which makes the trustees the stewards of those priceless a.s.sets, obliged to protect them and to manage the inst.i.tution that contains them. The people are the beneficiaries of that trust. between the city of New York and the museum's trustees. While the charitable corporation owns the art in the museum, some argue that it really holds its treasures in "trust," as first defined by the courts of fifteenth-century England. "The board doesn't own the art; it simply manages the corporation," says Ronald D. Spencer, an art law specialist. "The corporation functions as a caretaker for the public," which makes the trustees the stewards of those priceless a.s.sets, obliged to protect them and to manage the inst.i.tution that contains them. The people are the beneficiaries of that trust.

The museum's board must raise funds for acquisitions, exhibitions, conservation, education, and other costs not covered by the public's contributions, which have, over the years, ebbed and flowed with the currents of economic and political change. Though much is opaque about the Met's operations and finances, its scope can be gleaned from its tax return and annual reports, which are available for public scrutiny: in the year that ended on June 30, 2007, the Met had $299.5 million in revenue, $50 million of which came from public contributions, gifts, and grants, $27 million from the city (which included $12 million worth of gas and electricity, provided for free), almost $24 million from fees paid by its 134,291 members, and just under $26 million from the voluntary admission fees it requests at its entrances.4 Auxiliary activities and other income brought in more than $113 million. In 2006, the Met earned $10.6 million from entry fees for lectures and concerts, $8.6 million from major fund-raising parties (including two for the Costume Inst.i.tute, which alone brought in $4.5 million), and $2.5 million from its parking garage. It also netted $26.8 million selling art (the proceeds restricted to acquiring more), almost $4 million from its restaurant, and $41 million selling merchandise, most of which went untaxed because the museum claims that the goods, ranging from scholarly books to reproductions of art on ties and Christmas cards, are "related to the museum's charitable function" as an educational organization.

That's just the beginning. As of June 30, 2007, the museum's a.s.sets (not (not including its art) were valued at $3.6 billion, representing a 21.7 percent increase over 2006. Of that increase, $573.2 million came from dividends, interest, and capital gains on its $2.96 billion investment portfolio (which includes stocks, bonds, investment and hedge funds, and private equity and real estate investments). Of that, $69 million was transferred from the museum's endowment to its operating budget. The endowment contributed 30 percent of the museum's revenues that year, gifts from the public 26 percent, New York City 14 percent, admission contributions and members.h.i.+p fees 13 percent each, leaving an operating surplus of $2 million (compared with a $3 million deficit in 2006). including its art) were valued at $3.6 billion, representing a 21.7 percent increase over 2006. Of that increase, $573.2 million came from dividends, interest, and capital gains on its $2.96 billion investment portfolio (which includes stocks, bonds, investment and hedge funds, and private equity and real estate investments). Of that, $69 million was transferred from the museum's endowment to its operating budget. The endowment contributed 30 percent of the museum's revenues that year, gifts from the public 26 percent, New York City 14 percent, admission contributions and members.h.i.+p fees 13 percent each, leaving an operating surplus of $2 million (compared with a $3 million deficit in 2006).

That money paid for the museum's seventeen curatorial departments and eighteen hundred employees (whose efforts are augmented by about nine hundred volunteers) as well as its ancillary activities. Its payroll-or at least the paychecks of its top officers-reflects its status as a huge and hugely successful business. Montebello's total compensation topped $5 million in 2006; six other officers, including the PR man Holzer, were paid in excess of $300,000, and five more received only slightly less. Raking in well-earned big bucks were its chief investment officer (about $1.2 million), deputy chief investment officer ($700,000-plus), and senior investment officer ($337,000), as well as a computer operations manager (just under $400,000), registrar (about $375,000), and technology chief (about $327,000). Outside law firms earned $1 million from the museum in 2006, outside accountants almost $800,000, a human resources consultant almost $400,000, architects almost $6 million, construction contractors the same amount, and s.h.i.+pping and customs brokers almost $3.7 million.

The museum also spent almost $35 million on art that year; $63 million to operate its curatorial, conservation, cataloging, and scholarly publis.h.i.+ng departments; $47.3 million on guards; $40 million on its merchandise operations; $27 million on its galleries; $11 million on education and community services; the same to mount special exhibitions; almost $4 million for public relations; $3.8 million to run its restaurants; $3.4 million for its auditorium; $3 million on member services; $1.4 million to operate its garage; $712,000 on corporate events; $182,000 on government lobbying; $2 million on advertising; $4.3 million on repairs and maintenance; $3.7 million on insurance; almost $2 million on bank and credit card services; $1 million on reference and research materials; $1.3 million on its various programs; $1.8 million for catering; and more than $500,000 on interns and honoraria.

In the two years ending June 30, 2007, the museum also made significant capital improvements, spending some $240 million renovating its Greek and Roman wing and the Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education, $22 million to renovate the wing housing its African, Oceania, and Central and South American collections, almost $17 million to begin remaking the American Wing, $4.2 million to reinstall the Wrightsman Galleries, and about $27 million on other projects. About $61 million in contracts for capital improvements were in the pipeline. Also outstanding were bond liabilities of about $163 million, and a debt of $85 million on a $100 million line of credit from the JPMorgan Chase bank. All of this earned the Met the No. 36 spot on the 2007 NonProfit Times NonProfit Times list of America's largest nonprofit organizations (the Red Cross was No. 1, the New York Public Library, No. 42). list of America's largest nonprofit organizations (the Red Cross was No. 1, the New York Public Library, No. 42).

And that doesn't count the value of the art. "There is no way to calculate it," says the dealer Richard Feigen. "Most of the items are beyond prices realized in the market because the quality is generally beyond anything that has appeared. Think of all the departments ...Asian, Egyptian, cla.s.sical ... it's billions and billions and billions."

Consider that a Jackson Pollock painting sold in 2006 for $140 million. The Met owns at least two, forty Pollock drawings, and three sketch-books. That same year, a de Kooning painting sold for $137.5 million (the Met owns four and four drawings), and a Klimt painting for $135 million (the Met has two, although they are not as valuable). In 1990, van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for $82.5 million and a Renoir, sold for $82.5 million and a Renoir, Bal au Moulin de la Bal au Moulin de la Galette, Montmartre Galette, Montmartre, for $78.1 million. Ten years later, the Met owned twenty-seven Renoirs, and "they have over a billion dollars' worth of van Goghs alone," including at least eighteen paintings, another one of New York's top dealers says. Exact numbers are hard to come by. The Met's Web site refers to only seventeen van Gogh paintings and three drawings. The central catalog, a card file of museum holdings that was once open to the public, "is no longer updated," a member of that department e-mails in response to a request for information, so "is now rather incomplete." And the various curatorial departments have grown so territorial and secretive that they will not even share their records of departmental holdings with the museum's own Thomas J. Watson Library, as I learned when I called to confirm the numbers I could could find. find.

Michael Botwinick, director of New York's Hudson River Museum, formerly the a.s.sistant curator in chief of the Met, points out that it owns more-lots more-than paintings. What's it all worth? It's priceless, of course, since the Met will never sell its collection. But here's a ballpark estimate. "Consider today's art market," Botwinick says. "Twenty-five million dollars is not an unusual price for 'sought after' objects, $50 million is not an unusual price for 'important objects,' masterpieces are certainly going to fetch $100 million, and then there are the touchstone pieces [that are worth] let's say $250 million. Let's say there are a thousand in the $25 million sought-after category, five hundred in the $50 million important category, a hundred in the $100 million masterpiece category, and ten in the $250 million touchstone category. That alone is over $60 billion.

"Add to that all of the harder-to-figure things like the Cuxa Cloister, the Wrightsman period rooms, and the Temple of Dendur. Add to that the high-volume collections. I have little trouble thinking you could argue $100 billion easily."

Harry S. Parker III, a former vice director of the Met and later director of San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums, goes even higher. "I'd take a guess at $300 to $400 billion."

FROM ITS INCEPTION, OVERSIZED PERSONALITIES HAVE DOMINATED the Metropolitan; many loom large in American history, too. John Jay, grandson of the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, conceived of it. William Cullen Bryant, the orator, poet, journalist, publisher, and clubman, was one of the most eloquent advocates of the museum's creation. In recent times, its board heads have been some of America's most powerful businessmen: in the 1930s, George Blumenthal, who headed Lazard Freres; in the 1960s, Robert Lehman, the head of Lehman Brothers; in the 1970s, C. Douglas Dillon, John F. Kennedy's secretary of the Treasury; and in the 1990s, Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger, the chairman of the the Metropolitan; many loom large in American history, too. John Jay, grandson of the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, conceived of it. William Cullen Bryant, the orator, poet, journalist, publisher, and clubman, was one of the most eloquent advocates of the museum's creation. In recent times, its board heads have been some of America's most powerful businessmen: in the 1930s, George Blumenthal, who headed Lazard Freres; in the 1960s, Robert Lehman, the head of Lehman Brothers; in the 1970s, C. Douglas Dillon, John F. Kennedy's secretary of the Treasury; and in the 1990s, Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger, the chairman of the New York Times New York Times.

Some of these characters defined distinct eras in the museum's colorful history. Luigi Palma di Cesnola, named the first director by the mostly self-made founders, was an Italian count, a Civil War veteran given to inflating his rank, an American diplomat, and an amateur archaeologist, some of whose finds from Cyprus remain treasures in the museum's collections today; his excesses mark it still. J. Pierpont Morgan is credited with turning the Met from a semiprivate clubhouse for the trustees into a professional operation.

Following Morgan and dominating throughout the mid-twentieth century, though never serving as a trustee or officer, John D. Rockefeller Jr. was quietly its greatest benefactor, and his relations.h.i.+p with James Rorimer, the sixth director, was a model for the symbiosis between the rich and the scholarly that made the Met blossom even more after Morgan. Thomas Hoving, a scholar but also a showman like Cesnola, was appointed by a board of trustees led by a group of gunslinging veterans of John F. Kennedy's New Frontier administration; at their urging, he reinvented the Met, and in the process redefined all museums during his mere ten years as director, beginning in 1967.

IN 1920, AT THE MUSEUM'S FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION, the former secretary of state and Met trustee Elihu Root unveiled two marble slabs carved with benefactors' names in the Great Hall. Among the first names to be added were those of Rockefeller (who later contributed his collection of medieval art and the Cloisters to house it); the banker George Baker, who started what's now called Citibank and gave the museum an unrestricted seven-figure gift; and Frank Munsey, known as the most hated newspaper publisher in New York, who handed over an amazing $20 million in 1925-then the largest cash gift ever given to a museum-making the Met the wealthiest museum in the world.

Ever since, the Met has been a political, cultural, and social spectacle, especially when all three come together in the cauldron of fund-raising. Then the fun really begins. You can get a seat on the board by wielding power (like Henry Kissinger, who was recruited to lend geopolitical savvy), or waving your family bloodline or corporate flag (among the Met's brandname trustee dynasties have been Morgans, Astors, Whitneys, Rockefellers, Annenbergs, Houghtons, and various representatives of the Lazard Freres investment bank), or possessing a useful skill or connections (like any number of financiers, developers, and media t.i.tans such as Mrs. Ogden Reid, Henry R. Luce, and Sulzberger). But money counts most of all: a commitment to donate six-figure sums every year, or to twist the arms of other potential givers. "Give, get, or get out" is the rule.

Committee members.h.i.+p can cost even more, particularly if one lands a coveted seat on the acquisitions committee, where you're expected to cough up cash to buy treasures. The only exceptions are those who are rich in art and are wooed in the hope that those riches will one day be donated to the museum. Like the wine committee in a social club, acquisitions is the most fun, but not the most powerful, sinecure. That honor goes to executive, which really runs the show. As recently as thirty years ago, the museum's board actually functioned like one, arguing about issues, making a difference. Nowadays, it simply serves as an applauding claque for the smaller group that actually makes the decisions.

To oversimplify only somewhat, the Metropolitan Museum has always swung between two poles, two kinds of directors, revolutionaries and reactionaries, change agents and consolidators. Bomb throwers like Hoving and Francis Henry Taylor have wanted to open the museum up to the people, while the knee-jerk reflex of the trustees is to disdain the clamoring hordes. Montebello, almost all agree, was a brilliant example of the elitist director-the type that tends to be favored by executive trustees-but he was also a consummate bureaucrat, which may well explain how he lasted thirty years in his job. A distinguished success, well paid and highly respected, he was neither exciting nor adventurous-nor was he loved. He was hired to be exactly what he became: the keeper of a great tradition. Under Montebello, as in the heyday of the Brahmins, the museum-behind a curtain of secrecy-could do what it wanted.

BACK IN P PHILIPPE DE M MONTEBELLO'S OFFICE, I WOUND UP MY WOUND UP MY pitch for the museum's cooperation by gently telling him and Emily Kernan Rafferty, the museum's president, that I was aware that some months before the curatorial staff had been ordered not to speak to me. "Well," huffed Montebello, "we wouldn't do that! That would violate the principles of the museum. It would be wrong." Then he said it again. "It would be wrong." Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Rafferty trying to signal him, first subtly, then broadly, until finally she spoke up. "Uh," she interrupted, "Philippe ... ?" pitch for the museum's cooperation by gently telling him and Emily Kernan Rafferty, the museum's president, that I was aware that some months before the curatorial staff had been ordered not to speak to me. "Well," huffed Montebello, "we wouldn't do that! That would violate the principles of the museum. It would be wrong." Then he said it again. "It would be wrong." Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Rafferty trying to signal him, first subtly, then broadly, until finally she spoke up. "Uh," she interrupted, "Philippe ... ?"

She had in fact told her senior staff not to speak to me if I called them, she said.

"Well, that was wrong," Montebello huffed, but his heart was no longer in it. I left the room shortly after that with the distinct feeling that I was on my own. For I already knew that a curtain of secrecy had been hung over the museum long before Montebello's time. With the stakes so high and the money and egos involved so big, the Met has always had to operate in the shade, whether it was acquiring art under questionable circ.u.mstances, dealing with donors hoping to launder very sketchy reputations, or merely trying to appear above reproach in a world where behind almost every painting is a fortune and behind that a sin or a crime. So I was disappointed but unsurprised when, a few days later, a letter arrived, confirming that the museum, its staff, and supporters would not cooperate.

But that wasn't my last encounter with the top of the museum's organizational chart.

Dietrich von Bothmer, the museum's then eighty-nine-year-old curator emeritus of Greek and Roman art, was, I was told, close to death. "Get him now," more than one person urged. "He ought to have a lot to say." It was just at the moment when the heat was being turned up on antiquities in American museums. Bothmer's counterpart at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Marion True, was going on trial for acquiring and smuggling illegally looted antiquities in Italy (she would later face charges in Greece as well). Its government was pressuring the Met to return the greatest prize Bothmer ever brought home, the so-called Euphronios or Sarpedon krater, a huge vessel originally used to mix water with wine, painted with a scene of the death of Sarpedon, Zeus's son, by the Greek master Euphronios in about 515 B.C B.C. At the time, Montebello was digging in his heels; he didn't want to give it back.

When he'd bought the krater from True's co-defendant in Rome, a dealer named Robert Hecht Jr., Bothmer was hailed a hero-it was the finest of twenty-seven surviving vases by the painter-but he was also condemned by archaeologists who insisted that he had to have known it had just been dug from Italian soil. Surely, Bothmer had stories to tell. Maybe he would tell them. Maybe he hadn't gotten Rafferty's memo. Maybe he was too old to care.

So I wrote him a letter, and a few days later his wife, the former Joyce Blaffer, a Texas oil heiress, called and said that she would arrange with Miles, the nurse's aide who accompanied Bothmer to the museum each day, for me to interview him. Miles and I arranged to meet at the Met on February 1, 2007. Greeting me at the security desk, he said that after I spoke to Dr. Bothmer, the curator wanted me to read "his memoirs."

Upstairs, in one of the hidden warrens where the museum's staff works, Bothmer was sitting in a wheelchair, holding a wooden walking stick in his left hand, in the small windowless office the museum had a.s.signed him in retirement. He was sharply dressed in a black jacket and black sweater, his museum ID on a chain around his neck. He has straight white hair, a large, jutting face with a strong square chin, and searching eyes behind rectangular gla.s.ses. Clearly, he'd once been quite handsome. He was still imposing. I spent a pleasant hour chatting about everything from his family's background to his first days at the museum in the 1940s.

While we were talking, two curators, James C. Y. Watt, the Brooke Russell Astor Chairman of the museum's Department of Asian Art, and his wife, Sabine Rewald, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Curator in the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, stopped in. I was introduced to Rewald, who asked what I was doing. I explained I was interviewing Bothmer for a book on the museum, and she asked if I'd been "sent" by the museum's Communications Department. I said no, I was an independent author and hoped to interview her, too. Later that day, I would innocently call and leave her a message. She never replied.

Though Bothmer's recollections sometimes got what I'd call "stuck"-he would elaborate on stories we'd already covered as I tried to move the conversation forward-those moments were brief, and mostly he was engaged and engaging. Still, at the end of an hour, he was clearly tiring, so I suggested we continue the next day. At that, he was wheeled home, but not before Bothmer, his aide, and his a.s.sistant, Elizabeth, all urged me to stay and read his book, pointing to a large ma.n.u.script box sitting on Bothmer's desk.

The "book" turned out to be one of a series of oral history interviews with the museum's top trustees and staff, this one conducted in 1994 for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution. I had asked to read them, but I'd been told I needed the permission of the interviewees to see them and that had to come via the museum, so I was out of luck. Thrilled to finally be seeing one, I began by reading a cover letter from Ashton Hawkins, the museum's secretary and chief counsel from 1969 to 2001. It said, "We want to leave it up to you to decide whether to restrict access to the interview during your lifetime."

I got through about a third of the book that day, then left when Elizabeth had to go home. We discussed a plan for the next day and decided that I would return at 9:45 a.m. and continue reading until Bothmer joined me at 11:45 to resume the interview. Sometime after 10:00 the next morning, Elizabeth excused herself briefly. The day before, Miles had asked me to pick up the phone if it rang, so when it did, I answered without thinking. A mistake.

The caller identified herself as Sharon Cott, Ashton Hawkins's successor, the museum's senior vice president, secretary, and general counsel. "Is Miles there?"

I explained that he had not arrived and Elizabeth had stepped out. With a sinking feeling-I'd been busted!-I asked to take a message.

"Who is this?" she asked.

"Just a visitor." Why in G.o.d's name had I picked up the phone? Had Rewald called Cott instead of returning my call?

Elizabeth appeared, and I went back to reading while she returned Cott's call, instantly turning guarded. Elizabeth referred her to Miles. The phone rang again. Elizabeth listened and turned. "They"-Miles and Bothmer? Cott?-didn't want me to read the oral history, she said. But then she turned away and let me keep reading.

I started skimming, skipping ahead to the pages on more recent events.

Elizabeth's cell phone rang, and she left the room just as I reached a page that warned that what followed was not to be released until years after Bothmer's death. I stared at that page, wondering what lay beyond it, until Elizabeth returned. Now she said she really did have to take the pages away. But Bothmer would be there any minute.

Soon, Miles pushed Bothmer into the office, apologizing. With a glance, I tried to tell him no explanation was necessary. But explain, he did, in a rush. He had to take Bothmer "to therapy," an appointment he'd just remembered and that could not be switched.

"You've got five minutes," he said. "Make the most of it."

Less than three minutes later, Miles was back. He seemed embarra.s.sed and confused when I suggested we continue another day as Bothmer was clearly enjoying himself. He'd even said so. Then Miles and I stepped into the hall outside, where he said that "the museum" felt Bothmer was "doddering" and "senile" and because of "his condition" didn't want him speaking to me. He added something about having to stop me because we were on museum property. Antic.i.p.ating that problem, I had originally suggested to Joyce Bothmer that I interview him at home. Miles promised to speak to "Madam" about that. When we returned to the office, Bothmer was upset at the abrupt end of our conversation.

I suggested that I walk Miles and Bothmer out of the museum. Miles was b.u.t.toning Bothmer's coat when Sharon Cott appeared, grinning stiffly, saying nothing, arms tightly wound. Miles pushed Bothmer into the hall, where an awkward pas de quatre took place-no one acknowledging what was going on. Cott finally said she wanted to talk to Bothmer. He asked, "Is this a conspiracy?" I'd decided I liked him. "Several," I said.

"I don't know what you mean," Cott reprimanded me. I wondered, is this what you learn in law school? I told her we were all leaving. Did she want me to leave alone? She did. As I walked down the hall, Miles pushed a slightly bewildered Bothmer back into his office.

Perhaps Bothmer knows no secrets. But Tom Hoving told me that's not what the Italian government believed; he says the Euphronios krater was only returned after Italy threatened to indict Bothmer as it did Marion True and drag him into court.

With their curator emeritus confined to a wheelchair and, in the museum's estimation, doddering and senile, perhaps the museum's leaders were worried for his health. Or perhaps their concern was what he might say if questioned.

Regardless, he will take his secrets to the grave-at least until his full oral history emerges, if it ever does. The Metropolitan Museum is a storehouse of human memory. But it appeared, that day at least, it would just as soon its own be erased.

In August 1865, just after the end of the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson named a new American consul to the scrubby island of Cyprus, an outpost of the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The lucky appointee was an expatriate Italian, a minor aristocrat, and a soldier of fortune who'd survived the Austrian and Crimean wars, a pa.s.sage by s.h.i.+p to New York, years in poverty, and a suicide attempt before distinguis.h.i.+ng himself as a Union officer in the Civil War. Wounded in action, he was held prisoner, oddly enough by both his own side and the Confederacy. After winning his consuls.h.i.+p, he became an American citizen and began an eleven-year career in archaeology that would win him the riches and fame he dearly craved, but not the respect that he finally wanted more. War, President Andrew Johnson named a new American consul to the scrubby island of Cyprus, an outpost of the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The lucky appointee was an expatriate Italian, a minor aristocrat, and a soldier of fortune who'd survived the Austrian and Crimean wars, a pa.s.sage by s.h.i.+p to New York, years in poverty, and a suicide attempt before distinguis.h.i.+ng himself as a Union officer in the Civil War. Wounded in action, he was held prisoner, oddly enough by both his own side and the Confederacy. After winning his consuls.h.i.+p, he became an American citizen and began an eleven-year career in archaeology that would win him the riches and fame he dearly craved, but not the respect that he finally wanted more.

Cesnola was sometimes called a count (or conte conte in Italian), a t.i.tle he technically didn't hold before he renounced it on becoming a U.S. citizen. in Italian), a t.i.tle he technically didn't hold before he renounced it on becoming a U.S. citizen.1 That wasn't Cesnola's only upgrade. Though he'd risen only to the rank of colonel in the army, once appointed consul, he also promptly took to calling himself general, claiming, without any supporting evidence, that his commission was awaiting Abraham Lincoln's signature on the night of the president's a.s.sa.s.sination. New York's newspapers and official museum publications would later call him that regularly, as if he'd been one. But no matter. Though his route to his fate was anything but direct, n.o.bile Emmanuele Pietro Paolo Maria Luigi Palma di Conti di Cesnola was a man of destiny, and he was on course to become the first potentate of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a model, for both good and ill, for those who followed him. That wasn't Cesnola's only upgrade. Though he'd risen only to the rank of colonel in the army, once appointed consul, he also promptly took to calling himself general, claiming, without any supporting evidence, that his commission was awaiting Abraham Lincoln's signature on the night of the president's a.s.sa.s.sination. New York's newspapers and official museum publications would later call him that regularly, as if he'd been one. But no matter. Though his route to his fate was anything but direct, n.o.bile Emmanuele Pietro Paolo Maria Luigi Palma di Conti di Cesnola was a man of destiny, and he was on course to become the first potentate of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a model, for both good and ill, for those who followed him.

The museum's first acquisition with a dubious t.i.tle, he would not be the last.

THE M MET DIDN'T EXIST WHEN C CESNOLA WENT TO C CYPRUS. BUT a year after his appointment as consul, a group of Americans spending the summer of 1866 in Europe came together for an all-day, all-night Fourth of July party at Le Pre Catelan, a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne outside Paris, where two tents were set up for dining, another for dancing, and a fourth as a coat check, all decorated with French and American flags and portraits of George Was.h.i.+ngton and the reigning emperor, Louis Napoleon, who called himself Napoleon III. a year after his appointment as consul, a group of Americans spending the summer of 1866 in Europe came together for an all-day, all-night Fourth of July party at Le Pre Catelan, a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne outside Paris, where two tents were set up for dining, another for dancing, and a fourth as a coat check, all decorated with French and American flags and portraits of George Was.h.i.+ngton and the reigning emperor, Louis Napoleon, who called himself Napoleon III.

Addressing the gathering, John Jay, a lawyer, abolitionist, and founder of the Republican Party, as well as the grandson of the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, gave what an observer called "a most lively and amusing speech on the American Invasion of the Old World," during which he suggested that America needed an art museum of its own and that Americans like his fellow guests, who had experience abroad and the taste to appreciate Europe's treasures, were the ideal candidates to start it.2 Back in New York, Jay was a founder and the president of the civic-minded Union League Club, a group of pro-Union, antislavery entrepreneurs in a city generally known for pro-Confederacy sentiments. So besides wealth, a certain boldness characterized its early members. Soon, the club's art committee, headed by the magazine and book publisher George Palmer Putnam (whose authors included William Cullen Bryant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Was.h.i.+ngton Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe), was charged with making something of Jay's idea.

Museums were a European invention. In the early sixteenth century, Pope Julius II bought the Laoc.o.o.n Laoc.o.o.n, a marble sculpture that had been found buried in a Roman vineyard. A month after it was dug up, he put it on display, and the Vatican Museum was effectively born.3 In his history of the American museum, In his history of the American museum, Palaces for the People Palaces for the People, Nathaniel Burt says that artistically aware post-Renaissance Europeans didn't need museums because "they lived in them ... the Roman palazzo, German schloss, French chateau or English great house." Europe's museums grew out of those private treasure troves. The very first, in Basel, Switzerland, began as the private collection of Hans and Bonifacius Amerbach, friends of Hans Holbein the Younger's. In 1743, Anna Maria Ludovica, a Medici, gave her family collections to Florence on condition they never be removed and "should be for the benefit of the public of all nations." Similarly, the British Museum, chartered in 1753, was founded on the private collections of Sir Robert Cotton and his son Thomas, Robert Harley, and Hans Sloane (namesake of Sloane Street, Sloane Square, and Hans Crescent), who called his treasure house a museum because it contained objects for study, not pictures for mere enjoyment.

The Louvre, too, began as a private art collection, formed by Francois I and Louis XIV. Just after the French Revolution, the onetime Royal Palace was renovated and reopened for the public. But it was Napoleon who laid the foundation for the encyclopedic Louvre we know today, systematically looting treasures from the countries he conquered and bringing the spoils back to Paris. His brothers, whom he put in charge of nations he conquered, followed suit, helping to establish the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Museo n.a.z.ionale in Naples, and the Prado in Madrid.4 Burt says the first museum in America was the one opened by the painter Charles Willson Peale, who exhibited his portraits of heroes of the Revolution in Philadelphia in 1786. His sons later founded Baltimore's Peale Museum in 1814. Another artist, John Trumbull, was involved with the American Academy in New York, which opened and closed repeatedly at the start of the nineteenth century, and planted seeds from which sprang America's first true art museums-though they were really just galleries-in Connecticut, at Yale in New Haven, in 1832, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, which opened in 1844. But neither these museums, nor the several fledgling art societies and academies founded in New York, nor the New-York Historical Society, formed by families of the Dutch and English landed gentry in 1804, had the breadth to be considered in the same league as the museums of the Old World.5 The New-York Historical Society did have ambitions, though, so in 1856 it decided to expand its art holdings, swallowed up several more collections in the ensuing years, and in the summer of 1860 declared its intention to "establish a museum and art gallery for the public in Central Park."6 The historical society set its eye on the a.r.s.enal, a former munitions-storage facility at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street. The historical society set its eye on the a.r.s.enal, a former munitions-storage facility at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street.