The Met: What to See, Wing by Wing, and Where the Famous Works Are

The Metropolitan Museum of Art stands on Fifth Avenue at the edge of Central Park. It is not one building but many, each wrapped around the last. The first museum on this spot opened in 1880 in a Gothic brick building that is now hidden inside the Lehman Wing. Richard Morris Hunt's front on Fifth Avenue and the Great Hall behind it opened in 1902, and glass wings by the architect Kevin Roche were added on the park side from the 1970s. Can you see the famous works in two hours? Yes, if you know their gallery numbers. Every gallery at The Met has one, and the first digit is a good clue to where you are.

How the wings are laid out

You come in from Fifth Avenue into the Great Hall on Floor 1. From there the collection spreads out on two main floors.

• Floor 1. Egypt lies to the north, in the 100s, with the Temple of Dendur in Gallery 131. Greece and Rome lie to the south, in the 150s and 160s. Behind the grand staircase are the medieval halls, in the 300s, with arms and armour in the 370s and the American Wing beyond, starting at its sculpture court, Gallery 700. The art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas fills the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, in the 340s to 360s.
• Floor 2. The European paintings sit at the top of the grand staircase, in the 600s. The nineteenth century, from Courbet and Degas to Van Gogh and Gauguin, follows in the 800s. The art of Asia is in the 200s, and the American Wing continues upstairs, with its great paintings in Galleries 760 to 771.

The Met moves and lends its works and closes galleries in turn. The modern and contemporary galleries are closed for renovation, and on 22 October 2026 the museum's closures list also included Egyptian Galleries 118 to 120 and the Roof Garden. Check a work's page on the museum's website before you go if it is the reason for your visit.

Where the famous works are (October 2026)

Gallery numbers are the ones in the museum's own open data on 22 October 2026.

Work	Artist or maker	Floor	Gallery
Tomb of Perneb	Old Kingdom Egypt	1	100
William the hippo	Middle Kingdom Egypt	1	111
The Temple of Dendur	Roman Egypt	1	131
Sphinx of Hatshepsut	New Kingdom Egypt	1	131
Diana	Augustus Saint-Gaudens	1	700
Armour of George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland	Greenwich workshops	1	371
Armour of Henry II of France	French workshop	1	374
Yoroi of Ashikaga Takauji	Japanese armourers	1	377
Washington Crossing the Delaware	Emanuel Leutze	2	760
Heart of the Andes	Frederic Edwin Church	2	760
Madame X	John Singer Sargent	2	771
Young Woman with a Water Pitcher and four more Vermeers	Johannes Vermeer	2	614
Aristotle with a Bust of Homer	Rembrandt	2	616
The Harvesters	Pieter Bruegel the Elder	2	638
The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer	Edgar Degas	2	815
Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies	Claude Monet	2	819
Wheat Field with Cypresses	Vincent van Gogh	2	822
Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat	Vincent van Gogh	2	825
Circus Sideshow	Georges Seurat	2	825

What to see in about two hours

Start on Floor 1 with Egypt, cross to the American Wing and the armour, then take the stairs up to Floor 2 for the paintings.

Egypt. Just inside the Egyptian wing, in Gallery 100, you can walk into a real tomb chapel. The Tomb of Perneb comes from Saqqara and dates from about 2381 to 2323 BCE, and its front stands about 4.8 metres high. Keep going to Gallery 111 for William, the little blue hippo, only twenty centimetres long, with lotus flowers painted under his glaze.

The Temple of Dendur. Gallery 131 is a great glass room built for one gift. The Temple of Dendur came from Nubia, south of Aswan, and was given by Egypt to the United States in 1965. On its walls the pharaoh making offerings to the gods is the Roman emperor Augustus. Hatshepsut's granite sphinx shares the room. It is about 3.4 metres long and weighs nearly seven tonnes.

The American Wing court. Gallery 700, the Charles Engelhard Court, is a glass-roofed garden of sculpture. Look for Saint-Gaudens's gilded Diana, a half-size version of the weathervane that turned on the tower of Madison Square Garden, and for the marble front of a bank that stood on Wall Street in the 1820s.

Arms and armour. Gallery 371 is about armour for war and the tournament, with riders whose horses are armoured too. The Earl of Cumberland's suit, made at Greenwich in 1586, carries Elizabeth I's cipher of two letter Es back to back. In Gallery 374, the parade armour of Henry II of France is covered in embossed scenes, and his badge, a crescent moon, turns up again and again. Japanese armour fills Gallery 377, laced together in rows of coloured silk.

Washington and Madame X. Upstairs in the American Wing, Gallery 760 holds the giants. Washington Crossing the Delaware is about 3.8 metres high and 6.5 metres wide, and Church's Heart of the Andes hangs nearby. In Gallery 771 is Sargent's Madame X. As first shown at the Paris Salon of 1884, one strap of her gown had slipped off her shoulder. After the mockery, Sargent repainted it firmly in place.

Vermeer, Rembrandt and Bruegel. Every Vermeer the museum owns, five in all, hangs in Gallery 614. Young Woman with a Water Pitcher was the first Vermeer to enter an American collection, and X-rays of A Maid Asleep show a man in the doorway that Vermeer painted out. Next door in 616 is Rembrandt's Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, which the museum bought in 1961 for 2.3 million dollars, then a record for a painting. In Gallery 638, Bruegel's Harvesters, painted in 1565, is one of five surviving pictures of the seasons. In 1816 it sold in Paris for about ninety francs as the work of an old German master.

Degas and Van Gogh. Gallery 815 belongs to Degas and his dancers, and among the paintings stands The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, a bronze dressed in a cotton tutu and a silk ribbon. Her model was a ballet student, Marie van Goethem. Van Gogh is in two rooms. Gallery 822 holds Wheat Field with Cypresses, painted out of doors at Saint-Rémy in 1889, and in Gallery 825 his Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat from Paris hangs near Seurat's night-time Circus Sideshow, built from small dots of colour.

Tickets, hours and what to know

The Met Fifth Avenue is closed on Wednesdays. It opens from 10 to 5 on the other days, and until 9 on Fridays and Saturdays. It also closes on Thanksgiving Day, 25 December, 1 January and the first Monday in May. Admission is pay what you wish for New York State residents; other visitors buy a ticket from the museum. Bring headphones if you plan to listen as you walk.

How this fits the Roamer guide

Roamer has an independent audio guide to The Met that works gallery by gallery on Floors 1 and 2. Walk into any gallery and play its story, or follow a route when time is short: "The Met in an Hour" (nine stops, from a tomb you walk into to Vermeer and Bruegel), "The Met's Masterpieces in Two Hours" (twenty stops on both floors), "Rooms Moved Whole" (an Egyptian temple, Roman painted rooms, a Spanish patio and a Frank Lloyd Wright living room), "Small Wonders" (William the hippo and ten more small pieces) and "From Gothic Brick to Glass", about the building itself. You can find it here: The Met guide. The guide is independent of the museum, and admission is separate.

Cover photo: Diane Picchiottino, via Unsplash.