20 Essential Artworks to Visit at the Met, Hiding in Plain Sight

Marble statue of a kouros, ca. 590–580 BCE (Gallery 154)

For an artwork over 2500 years old, this 6 1/2-foot-tall sculpture depicting a handsome Athenian youth is amazingly intact. Some remnants of paint are even visible on the statue’s nipples, a reminder that these artworks were once vibrantly pigmented (as the Met’s current exhibit “Chroma,” vividly demonstrates).

Though you might not guess it, this kouros is nothing short of an engineering marvel. Similar sculptures from the period were carved from, or supported by, a marble slab. The sculpture weighs a metric ton but manages to balance that staggering weight on slightly spaced legs—a pose likely inspired by precedents in Egyptian art, which also depicted figures in mid pace.

We’ll encounter this young man again later. Sort of.

Queen Mother pendant mask (Iyoba), 16th century (Gallery 136)

Nearby is a gallery containing works from sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, and the Americas that were once housed in the museum’s Rockefeller Wing, which is undergoing major renovations and will reopen in 2025. This stunningly intricate ivory mask—as well as its nearly identical twin at the British Museum—was made in the early 16th century for Oba Esigie, the king of Benin, who may have worn it during ceremonies; it’s believed to posthumously depict his mother, Idia.

Both masks were among hundreds of artifacts violently looted during the British siege of Benin City in 1897, a provenance the Met concedes in its catalog. The seized works have become known colloquially as “Benin bronzes” and inspired an international repatriation campaign. Last year, the Met returned three Benin bronzes to Nigerian officials; those artworks and other repatriated artifacts will be displayed at the Edo Museum of West African Art upon its completion in 2025.

Sphinx of Hatshepsut, ca. 1479–1458 BCE (Gallery 131)

Next we come to our first marquee exhibit: the Temple of Dendur. But we’re not here for the Temple. Just to its left, you’ll see a sphinx wearing the traditional nemes, the headcloth and false beard combo that signals pharaonic power. It’s also usually a signifier of maleness—but according to the hieroglyphs on the sphinx’s chest, the statue in fact depicts Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh who led Egypt in a highly successful 20-year reign.

This sphinx is one of many artistic renderings of Hatshepsut in the Met’s collection, which variously depict her as female and male. Poke around the Ancient Egypt wing and you’ll find this likeness, originally carved into the side of her mortuary temple outside Thebes, as well as several devotional figurines and another seated sphinx.

Hermon Atkins MacNeil,The Sun Vow, 1899, cast 1919 (Gallery 700)

The American Wing atrium is one of the most iconic spaces in the museum, and its centerpiece one of the museum’s most iconic works: Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (1894), which once perched atop Madison Square Garden. But keep strolling; you’ll find our next stop near the American Wing Café.

The Sun Vow depicts an unidentified Native America elder peering over the shoulder of a youth, also anonymous, as he launches an arrow toward the sun. According to “tradition,” if the elder loses sight of the arrow, the boy will have come of age—except, as Tlingit artist Jackson Polys notes in the wall label for the work, this tradition doesn’t actually exist.

Hermon Atkins MacNeil either completely invented The Sun Vow’s scenario or absorbed it from wrongheaded depictions of Indigenous people he and millions of other visitors encountered at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian World’s Exposition. The Sun Vow is rooted more in classical sculpture, which MacNeil studied in Rome on a scholarship, than in any Native reality. The artist’s inspiration is clear in the figures’ poses, as well as in the fig leaf awkwardly covering the boy’s genitals—absent in an earlier large-scale cast of the work owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.

Once you’re done checking out the atrium—and have hoovered up some café grub, if you need it—ascend to the second floor via one of the few works in the museum you can walk on: a salvaged 1893 staircase from Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan’s now-demolished Chicago Stock Exchange building. At the top, admire the view of Autumn Landscape, a triptych of stunning Tiffany windows.

Prince Demah, Portrait of William Duguid, 1773 (Gallery 747)

In the same room as Robert Joyce’s 18th-century clock is this small, nearly missable portrait—but it’s one of the Met’s most important holdings. It’s the work of Prince Demah, the only known enslaved artist to document the Colonial era. He is sometimes cited with the same surname as his enslaver, Henry Barnes, but Demah himself dropped the name after the Loyalist Barnes family fled from Boston to London before the Revolutionary War.

This portrait is something of an advertisement for its sitter, textile merchant William Duguid, who dons a lavishly embroidered robe—perhaps made of his own ware—in front of his collection of leather-bound books. The artwork carries a whiff of revolutionary pride, too: Portraits such as these showed off colonists’ supposed enterprise, wealth, and erudition to their imperial subjugators. Demah himself remained in the American Colonies after the Barnes family left for London; he enlisted in the Massachusetts militia before his death from an unknown illness in 1778.

John Singer Sargent, Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes, 1897 (Gallery 771)

John Singer Sargent’s Madame X (1883–84), known for its racy depiction of Madame Pierre Gautreau, caused a furor when first exhibited. But we’re a little more interested in the painting to its right.

This double portrait wasn’t supposed to be a double when it was commissioned as a wedding gift for the couple: Sargent had intended to depict the fashionable Mrs. Stokes in daywear with her Great Dane. The Great Dane, however, “became unavailable,” so Mr. Stokes himself offered to stand in for the dog. The result is a somewhat comic and unintentionally progressive portrayal of the pre-suffrage American woman.

This wasn’t Mrs. Stokes’s first outing as an artist’s model: She also posed for Daniel Chester French’s The Republic, the grand, gilded statue that overlooked the 1893 Columbian Exposition. A one-third-scale replica still stands near the original fairgrounds, in Chicago’s Jackson Park.

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Self-Portrait With Two Pupils, Marie Gabrielle Capet and Marie Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemond, 1785 (Gallery 616)

Now on to the European Paintings wing. (You’ll know you’re in the right place if you encounter a gallery with Jacques Louis David’s 1787 The Death of Socrates.)

Farther in, you’ll find this painting, a remarkable depiction of Labille-Guiard—one of the few women admitted to the Académie Royale at the time—teaching two female pupils. The painting has been interpreted through a feminist lens, with many believing that Labille-Guiard chose such subjects to explicitly advocate for the inclusion of more women in France’s upper artistic echelon.

 Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Juan de Pareja, 1650 (Gallery 617)

As you enter Gallery 617, your eye will likely be drawn to the next painting on our list, among the most significant in the Met’s holdings. It’s unknown when Juan de Pareja, an enslaved Afro-Hispanic man, entered Velázquez’s service. What we do know is that Velázquez painted this likeness of Pareja in early 1650 in Rome, and that it was immediately hailed as a landmark work of Western portraiture. When the Met bought it for nearly $5.5 million in 1970, it broke art market records.

Velázquez freed Pareja upon their return to Spain in 1654; the manumission document still survives. Pareja was himself a painter whose work and contemporaries are the subject of a Met exhibit coming in the spring of 2023.

Astor Chinese Garden Court, Ming dynasty style (Gallery 217)

There’s much to admire in the Asian Art wing, from this dappled, dynamic figurine of a Han dynasty female dancer from the second century BCE to Isamu Noguchi’s Met-commissioned Water Stone installation (1986). But if your feet—and brain—need a break, be sure to stop by the Met’s most peaceful oasis.

The Astor Chinese Garden Court’s 17th-century-inspired design hews to the complimentary-yet-contrasting ethos of yin and yang, with contrasting circular and rectangular archways, rough-hewn Taihu sculpture against smooth granite, lazily burbling water fountains and dry stone. Another era-specific detail is the exquisitely intricate roof tiling, designed to direct water from the roofs of the pavilions in perfectly spaced streams—not that the covered atrium will be seeing rain anytime soon.

Celestial dancer (Devata), mid-11th century (Gallery 241)

Continue exploring the Asian Art wing, and you’ll encounter this intricately detailed sandstone sculpture, which likely adorned a temple in what is present-day Madhya Pradesh, in central India. The figure’s curvature aligns with dance poses documented in the Naṭyasastra, a Sanskrit treatise on the performing arts; here she dances for a divine audience of Hindu gods. Even sans limbs, the life-size sculpture conveys the energy and movement of a flesh-and-blood dancer.

Bowl with Arabic inscription, 10th century (Gallery 450)

Next, head past the Great Hall Balcony to the Met’s Islamic Art wing, where you’ll find our next two highlights.

The first, produced in northeastern Iran during the Samanid period, is an earthenware bowl that’s remarkable not only for its maker’s sculptural mastery but also for its striking calligraphic detail. The highly stylized “new style” Arabic script inscribed along its inner rim translates to “Planning before work protects you from regret; prosperity and peace.”

Jonah and the Whale, folio from the Jami al-Tavarikh (Compendium of Chronicles), ca. 1400 (Gallery 455)

Sometimes called “the first world history,” the Jami al-Tavarikh is a literary work compiled during the Mongol Ilkhanate (1256–1335) by the historian Rashīd al-Dīn. Published in three volumes and requiring hundreds of calligraphers and illustrators to complete, it documents history from a Mongol perspective.

This painting on paper, our second highlight in the Islamic Wing, is not an excerpt from what survives of the Jami al-Tavarikh itself. Instead, it’s an unnamed illustrator’s artistic interpretation of one of the compendium’s most popular tales, that of Jonah and the Whale. It’s unclear whether this painting had an additional, non-ornamental purpose; some speculate that it might have been used during oral recitation or storytelling.

Much like the original Jami al-Tavarikh illustration, the artist depicts Jonah as he is freed from the whale’s stomach. An angel flies in from the upper-right corner to offer him clothes, and a gourd vine creates a canopy above his head as an additional symbol of spiritual protection. The inscription on Jonah’s arms reads: “The sun’s disk went into darkness, Jonah went into the mouth of the fish.”

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat, 1887 (obverse: The Potato Peeler, 1885) (Gallery 825)

The 19th and Early 20th Century European wing boasts some of the museum’s most famous pieces, including works by Auguste Rodin (Gallery 800), paintings by Claude Monet (Gallery 819) and other Impressionists (Gallery 822), and Pablo Picasso’s famous 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein (Gallery 830, on the way to the Modern/Contemporary wing).

This double-sided Van Gogh canvas is also a highlight. Van Gogh’s personal style underwent a total about-face after he took in the work of the Impressionists for the first time, and you can see that change happen at warp speed here. He abandoned dour, day-in-the-life scenes like The Potato Peeler for kaleidoscopic dreamscapes rendered in evocative, slashing strokes—like this self-portrait on The Potato Peeler’s verso. It’s hard to believe the works are separated by just two years (and a millimeter or so of canvas).

Maya monumental figure, ninth century (Gallery 999)

This sculpture has had pride of place in two recent Met exhibits: “Crossroads: Power and Piety” and “Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art.” It depicts Chahk, a storm deity who creates thunder and lightning by striking the heavens with his giant, two-bladed ax. (Here, the blades are unfortunately lost to time.) At eight feet, it’s even taller than the Greek kouros we admired at the start of our tour, albeit not heavier—instead of marble, it’s made of lighter limestone. At the time it was created, more than a thousand years ago, the statue was likely affixed to the wall of a royal court building, its scowl surely meant to intimidate all who entered.

Isamu Noguchi, Kouros, 1945 (Gallery 919)

In the same gallery as Jackson Pollock’s epic Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), you’ll find Isamu Noguchi’s abstract, towering Kouros. This piece was directly inspired by the very same kouros we admired on first entering the museum, and not just in name: Noguchi achieved a similar feat of engineering when he created this work immediately after World War II, balancing pieces of pink Georgian marble around two strategically placed pins.

But unlike the ancient kouros, which was created just before a boom in Athenian life and culture, Noguchi’s embodies a deep unease with the world to come—a world that was already reeling from genocide, nuclear warfare, and foreign occupation. One of the marble pieces, tellingly, looks like the leg of the original kouros, though what it’s striding toward is uncertain.

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Studio), 2014 (Gallery 915)

Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (Studio) is a visual parade of artistic references and allusions. The cutaway anatomical skull sitting on the table? Think of it as a 21st-century answer to the Dutch memento mori tradition. That pink cake sitting on a platter? There’s something Cezanne-like in its skewed perspective. The relaxed pose of the male nude behind the easel? He stands in classical contrapposto, with his weight on one leg.

Untitled (Studio) was loosely inspired by Marshall’s formative school trip to Charles White’s studio in Los Angeles. Marshall later wrote about that experience for The Paris Review: “There before me was revealed the secret of the masters. I saw finished works next to half-finished drawings. There were also works just under way, barely sketched in. In that instant, I understood that artists were not wizards, that the work they do can seem magical but in reality is achieved through knowledge, a deep understanding of the principles governing representation, and a willingness to engage in the intensive labor required to effectively render the images you envision.”

Marshall conjures the emotion of that memory in Untitled (Studio). In a single canvas, he pays simultaneous tribute to his art historical influences and to painters like Charles White, who depicted Black life with purpose, skill, and grace.

Thomas Hart Benton, America Today, 1930–31 (Gallery 909)

Thomas Hart Benton painted this ensconcing mural for a boardroom at the New School in New York, its 10 panels showcasing the regionalist and pro-labor impulses that would define much of his career. In the panel Steel, a toiling worker in a loose-fitting white tank top dominates the right side of the tableau, his features illuminated by a forge. The model for this figure? One of Benton’s students at New York’s Art Students League: 18-year-old Jackson Pollock. Benton even sneaked himself into the lower right corner of the panel City Activities With Dancehall: He is the figure in rolled sleeves clinking glasses with bespectacled New School cofounder Alvin Johnson, presumably drinking to a mural well painted.

Dave the Potter (David Drake), storage jar, 1858 (Gallery 955)

This 25-gallon storage jar and other vessels by David Drake are currently on display (through February 5, 2023) as part of the exhibition “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina,” in in Gallery 955, just beyond the mighty 18th-century choir screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid.

Edgefield, where Drake was born into slavery in 1800 or 1801, was located atop rich clay deposits that made it a pottery manufacturing center—one that relied heavily on enslaved labor. Drake’s work is typical of the alkaline-glazed pottery produced there during the mid 1800s, but, in an unusual (and, for a slave, dangerous) act of pride in his skill, he frequently signed his works with his first name—hence his moniker Dave the Potter.

Drake’s handiwork is instantly recognizable for its incised inscriptions on the exterior of the pots. One side of this vessel reads, “this jar is to Mr Segler who keeps the bar in orangeburg / for Mr Edwards a Gentle man — who formly kept / Mr thos bacons horses / April 21 1858,” and the other, “when you fill this Jar with pork or beef / Scot will be there; to get a peace, – / Dave.”

Drake lived to see freedom, albeit briefly. He was last documented as “David Drake” in the 1870 census. He does not appear in the next census 10 years later.

Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman With a Water Pitcher, ca. 1662 (Gallery 964)

The Met is celebrated for its collection of works by the Dutch Masters, and this painting was the first Vermeer to enter an American collection. Check out the reflections of the tablecloth and blue drape on the brass pitcher and tray and the way Vermeer renders light softly entering the room.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait, 1660 (Gallery 964)

At the time Rembrandt painted this self-portrait, the once-lauded artist was at a low point. Saskia, his beloved wife and muse, had died at age 36, and he had gone bankrupt, auctioning off his house and most of his possessions to stave off creditors. Rembrandt would live nearly a decade longer, producing five more self-portraits, but this canvas marks a turning point: His best years were behind him. It might be an overstatement to say that this self-portrait is an agonized one, but it’s certainly unsparing: His face is lined, his curls gray, his cheeks bluish with five-o’clock shadow, and his expression rueful. It’s a glimpse into a time, however unimaginable to us now, when Rembrandt’s legacy was less than assured.