Editorial Review
The Metropolitan Museum's collection of Old Master and nineteenth-century European paintings—one of the greatest such collections in existence—numbers approximately 2,200 works, dozens of which are instantly recognizable worldwide. The French, Italian, and Dutch schools are most strongly represented, with fine works also by British, Netherlandish, German, Spanish, and Flemish masters. The department's holdings—which consist not only of paintings on canvas and wood but also of frescoes, oil sketches, and finished pastels on paper, as well as a small number of Greek and Russian icons—range in date from the twelfth through the nineteenth century. Among its many masterpieces are exceptional assemblages of the work of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo; of the French Impressionists (the Museum owns thirty-seven Monets and twenty-one oil paintings by Cézanne); and of Vermeer, whose five canvases at the Metropolitan surpass the number at any other museum in the world.
