New York Gets Its Met

On April 13, 1870, the New York State Legislature incorporated the Metropolitan Museum of Art, chartering twenty trustees to build and run a museum and library devoted to the fine arts. The idea started in Paris back in 1866, when a group of American expatriates that included the lawyer John Jay resolved to found what they called a national institution and gallery of art. Once Jay got home, the Union League Club of New York rallied the money and the connections to make it happen, and John Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive and serious collector, became the museum's first president. There was no building and no public show yet: the Met opened its first exhibition two years later in a rented space on Fifth Avenue, while its very first accessioned object, a Roman marble sarcophagus, arrived that November as a gift from an American diplomat posted in what is now Turkey.