Why The Met Cloisters matters.
The Met Cloisters is a transporting medieval museum where Fort Tryon Park's Hudson River heights meet European monastic architecture, Romanesque sculpture, Gothic art and gardens assembled within a hilltop complex devoted to the Middle Ages.
Set within Fort Tryon Park near Margaret Corbin Circle and just steps from Linden Terrace, the museum occupies a four-acre summit overlooking the Hudson River and the wooded Palisades, with stone towers, terraces and enclosed courtyards rising from the park's rocky northern terrain. Charles Colview designed the present building as an ensemble of ecclesiastical and secular spaces ordered chronologically, incorporating architectural elements from Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Trie-sur-Baïse, Froville and other European sites. The Cuxa Cloister forms the main level's architectural center around a garden enclosed by arcades reconstructed from 460 fragments, including 36 original capitals carved from pink Languedoc marble. Three reconstructed cloisters contain gardens derived from medieval herbals, poetry, horticultural texts and imagery preserved in tapestries, stained glass and carved capitals, linking living plants to the artistic culture represented inside. The result is a museum whose medieval stonework, enclosed gardens, chronological interiors and Hudson River setting create an architectural world specifically constructed for the close study of European art from the Middle Ages.
What defines The Met Cloisters.
The Met Cloisters is best known for uniting medieval European art and architecture in an institution descended from sculptor George Grey Barnard's private collection, which first opened to the public on Fort Washington Avenue in 1914. Barnard had acquired substantial quantities of medieval sculpture and architectural fragments in France, arranging them in an unconventional installation that became the first American museum presentation of its kind devoted to medieval art. John D. Rockefeller Jr. supplied the money that enabled The Metropolitan Museum of Art to purchase Barnard's museum and most of its contents in 1925, then contributed more than 40 medieval works from his own holdings. Joseph Breck, the branch's first curator and director, modified Barnard's original site during the transitional years, adding medieval-inspired gardens and completing the installation of further architectural elements from Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa. Rockefeller simultaneously assembled land farther north, financed its conversion into Fort Tryon Park and reserved four acres for a larger museum after The Met concluded in 1927 that Barnard's building no longer supported the scholarly presentation sought for the growing collection. Rockefeller extended the project across the Hudson by donating 700 acres on the New Jersey Palisades plateau in 1933, protecting the western landscape visible from the future museum. Groundbreaking followed in 1934 during the Great Depression, and the construction campaign provided employment as the museum and surrounding park took form together. James Rorimer, who worked closely on the installation and later became director of The Met, joined Breck and Rockefeller among the central figures shaping the new institution before its public opening on May 10, 1938. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, Met president George Blumenthal and Rockefeller addressed 250 guests gathered in the Late Gothic Hall that afternoon, marking the completion of a project linking Barnard's collecting, Rockefeller's patronage and The Met's medieval scholarship on Manhattan's northern heights.
The Fuentidueña Apse became one of the museum's most ambitious postwar additions through a complex international agreement centered on the twelfth-century church of San Martín in northern Spain. The Spanish government agreed in 1957 to a permanent loan of the Romanesque apse, whose dismantling required 3,300 individual stones to be numbered, removed and packed before shipment to New York. The agreement involved consultation with Spanish authorities and the Vatican, with The Met securing funds for work on a cemetery and church at Fuentidueña and lending significant frescoes to the Prado in Madrid. Reassembly began in New York in 1958 and finished in 1961, reconstructing the apse beneath its barrel vault and half-dome with three small windows, sculpted capitals and stone ornament surrounding the openings. A fresco of the Virgin and Child in Majesty and a painted wooden crucifix from other Spanish sites joined the architecture inside the completed chapel, creating a concentrated presentation of Romanesque architecture, sculpture and painting. The Fuentidueña project extended the museum beyond the architectural fragments assembled during its founding era, bringing an almost complete Spanish apse across the Atlantic through an agreement involving The Met, the Spanish government, the Prado and church authorities.
How The Met Cloisters fits.
The Met Cloisters works as the anchor for an Upper Manhattan afternoon connecting a major twentieth-century garden, Manhattan's last farmhouse and a colonial residence whose occupants crossed opposing sides of the American Revolution.
Begin at Heather Garden, a three-acre horticultural composition within Fort Tryon Park whose origins belong to the larger landscape commissioned by John D. Rockefeller Jr. from the Olmsted Brothers firm in 1927. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. spent four years reshaping the rocky terrain and thin soil into promenades, terraces, wooded slopes and eight miles of pedestrian paths before Rockefeller presented the completed park to New York City in 1935. Fiscal deterioration during the 1970s left the garden overgrown and blocked Hudson River views, leading the Greenacre Foundation to fund a 1983 landscape restoration executed by NYC Parks, Quennell Rothschild & Partners and horticulturist Timothy Steinhoff. Lynden B. Miller and Ronda M. Brands developed another planting plan beginning in 2009, and the garden now contains more than 650 varieties of native and exotic plants, trees and shrubs. Continue to Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, built 1784 after William Dyckman returned from wartime refuge in upstate New York to find his family's northern Manhattan home and orchards destroyed. William rebuilt beside Kingsbridge Road, and his son Jacobus assumed the farm after William's 1787 death, eventually enlarging the house across subsequent decades. Mary Alice Dyckman Dean and Fannie Fredericka Dyckman Welch directed a restoration beginning in 1915, opening the farmhouse as a museum in July 1916; historian Reginald Pelham Bolton contributed a reconstructed Hessian Hut derived from excavations of a Revolutionary War encampment containing more than 60 soldiers' huts near present-day 201st through 204th Streets. Conclude at Morris-Jumel Mansion, built 1765 as Mount Morris for British colonel Roger Morris and Mary Philipse Morris on more than 100 acres of northern Manhattan. George Washington occupied the abandoned house as his headquarters from September 15 through October 21, 1776, encompassing the Battle of Harlem Heights, and British commander Sir Henry Clinton and Hessian troops later used the property during the same war. Stephen and Eliza Jumel purchased Mount Morris in 1810 and substantially renovated it, and the residence became a museum in 1904 after more than a century of private ownership, wartime occupation, tavern use and changing estates. The progression moves from Olmsted Jr.'s twentieth-century garden through the Dyckman family's post-Revolutionary rebuilding into a colonial house occupied by Washington, British forces and Hessian troops, revealing Upper Manhattan through landscape design, agricultural survival and the military history embedded in its surviving architecture.
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