Ben Ellis, age 15, of Wilmington, Del., for his question:
WHERE IS THE LARGEST U. S. ART MUSEUM?
New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest art museum in the United States. It was founded in 1870 and opened. at its present location on Fifth Avenue in 1880.
More than 3 million visitors are attracted to the museum each year. Experts rate it as one of the world's greatest and put it in the same class as the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris.
Under the original charter written by city officials and the Metropolitan's founders, the museum is located on city land in Manhattan's Central Park. Construction was financed by private and public funds and governed by a private board of trustees with city representation. This type of administration has become a model for other institutions.
The first of many wings was added to the original building in 1888. Additions and changes have occurred ever since.
Among the Metropolitan Museum's benefactors are some of the greatest names in American business and finance. They include John D. Rockefeller Jr., William Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan.
Gifts of art collections and money, supplemented by corporate and government grants and by visitors, donations, continue to make possible the museums services to the public.
Included in the Metropolitan Museum's collections are some of the worlds best old master paintings, drawings and prints and American and European decorative arts and sculpture.
The Metropolitans Egyptian Department is considered to be one of the greatest archaeological collections outside the Cairo Museum. Other treasures include early Islamic art excavated by a museum team in Iran, the greatest assemblage of Chinese textiles outside the Imperial Palace Museum in Peking and a renowned collection of musical instruments.
The library of the museum was reorganized and officially designated as the Thomas J. Watson Library in 1959. Today, it is considered the most comprehensive art and archaeological reference library in the world.
In 1975, the Metropolitans Robert Lehman Pavilion opened. It re creates the atmosphere of the New York town house of the American banker and displays his collection of paintings and art objects.
The Sackler Wing, opened in 1978, houses the Temple of Dendur, which was rescued from the waters of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt.
The American Wing opened in 1980. It is a museum within a museum: 34 galleries of decorative arts and period rooms from the 17th to the early 19th Century.
In 1981, the Astor Chinese Garden Court was opened and in 1982, the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing was opened, displaying the Department of Primitive Art, which included a collection of about 7,000 works from Africa, Oceania and the Americas and the Robert Goldwater Memorial Library.
Later installations house the ancient Near Eastern art collection and the Douglas Dillon Galleries for Chinese paintings.