The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art

History and architecture

The Cloisters, designed by architect Charles Collens of the Boston firm of Allen, Collens & Willis, was completed in May 1936. It is a part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and houses a large portion of the Museum's medieval art collection.

The collection at The Cloisters had its beginnings in the sculpture and architectural artifacts acquired by sculptor George Grey Barnard (1863-1935), who initially opened his collection to the public in 1914 in an exhibition building at 698 Fort Washington Avenue.

In 1925, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., donated funds to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to enable it to purchase Barnard's collection, which was reopened in 1926 in the same building as a branch of the Metropolitan Museum and called "The Cloisters."

Rockefeller had purchased the Fort Tryon property—notable as the site of a Revolutionary War battle—and gave it to the City of New York in 1930, reserving a four-acre site at the north end of the park for a museum building.

Rockefeller wanted The Cloisters to be a place where people, who were not scholars of the Middle Ages , could enjoy and benefit from seeing superb examples of that period. At the same time, he wanted a museum where students and scholars could view the collections under ideal conditions , combining quiet study and good visibility.

He wanted the objects to speak for themselves in harmonious surroundings that were not subject to modern whims or fashions. The Cloisters has been described: '"as a structure... integrated with its monuments and objects, the reciprocal relationship being fundamental to the whole."

Rockefeller chose Charles Collens, the same architect whom he had commissioned to design Riverside Church, to carry out his conception for The Cloisters. Collens' perception of The Cloisters accorded with Rockefeller's, to whom he wrote in 1931: "...whoever does that building would have to work out all the individual exhibits in such a way as to place them to the greatest advantage and give each one a setting which would minimize the fact that it was an exhibit, but a part of a composition and naturally fitted into the particular spot best adapted to the conditions under which it existed in its original state."

With greatly enlarged collections, The Cloisters opened at its present location in May 1936, an in 1952 Rockefeller endowed The Cloisters with a large grant to assure its permanence.