Famous Paintings at the Met: 9 You Should Not Miss

Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware is more than 21 feet wide, and the Met calls it the "unavoidable highlight of the American Wing." It opens this list of nine famous paintings at the Met, which goes on through Rembrandt, Vermeer and David to Degas, Monet, Van Gogh and Picasso. Several of them also appear on our page of the world's best-known paintings.

The nine are grouped by the Met's own departments: the American Wing, European Paintings, and Modern and Contemporary Art. Each gallery number below was checked on the Met's website on October 17, 2026.

At a glance

#	Painting	Artist	Year	Gallery (Oct. 17, 2026)
1	Washington Crossing the Delaware	Emanuel Leutze	1851	760
2	Madame X	John Singer Sargent	1883 to 1884	771
3	Aristotle with a Bust of Homer	Rembrandt	1653	616
4	Young Woman with a Water Pitcher	Johannes Vermeer	c. 1662	614
5	The Death of Socrates	Jacques-Louis David	1787	634
6	The Dance Class	Edgar Degas	1874	815
7	Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies	Claude Monet	1899	819
8	Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat	Vincent van Gogh	1887	825
9	Gertrude Stein	Pablo Picasso	1905 to 1906	965

The American Wing

01Washington Crossing the Delaware, Emanuel Leutze (1851)

Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware hangs in Gallery 760 of the American Wing. Leutze painted it in Germany, and the signature at lower right reads "E. Leutze / Dusseldorf 1851." It was a great success there, at a time of revolutionary fervor in Germany itself.

After Leutze, the canvas passed through three owners before it reached the Met. The dealers Goupil, Vibert and Company handled it first. The New York collector Marshall O. Roberts then kept it until he died. John Stewart Kennedy bought it at the 1897 sale of Roberts's estate and gave it to the museum that same year.

Leutze painted the crossing 75 years after the event, and he got a good deal of it wrong. Dave Kindy's HistoryNet list of its errors starts with the flag: Continental troops flew the Grand Union, not the Stars and Stripes. The men also crossed in larger, flat-bottomed Durham boats, around midnight and in a snowstorm.

The New York canvas is Leutze's second version of the scene. His first one hung in the Kunsthalle Bremen until a 1942 RAF bombing raid destroyed it.

On the Met's audio guide, the Mohawk cultural historian Scott Manning Stevens looks at who is in the boat. He picks out soldiers, farmers and an African American man. At the back, he points to a Native American in fairly accurate Northeast Woodlands dress. More national favorites appear in our tour of icons of American painting.

02Madame X, John Singer Sargent (1883 to 1884)

Madame X hangs in Gallery 771, also in the American Wing. Today it counts among the famous faces in Western painting, but in 1884 it nearly derailed Sargent's career. The sitter, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, was a Louisiana-born woman known in Paris for her artful appearance.

Sargent painted her without a commission. He hoped the picture would win him praise and clients at the Salon of 1884. Its palette and brushwork owe much to Velázquez, its profile to Titian, and its flat face and figure to Manet and Japanese prints.

The Salon crowd ridiculed it instead. Viewers were shocked by her skin tone and cosmetics, and by a jeweled strap slipping off her right shoulder. Gautreau and her mother begged Sargent to take the picture down. He refused, but after the Salon closed he repainted the strap and kept the canvas in his studio.

In spring 1886 Sargent moved to England, where he stayed for the rest of his life. Thirty-two years after the Salon, in January 1916, he offered the painting in a letter to the Met's director, Edward Robinson. Once the sale was agreed, he asked that it not carry her name, "on account of the row I had with the lady years ago." So the museum's paperwork called her Madame X.

European Paintings before 1800

This department also has Caravaggio's The Musicians (1597), in Gallery 620. Look for the second boy from the right, who is the painter himself.

His contemporary Giovanni Baglione wrote that Caravaggio painted a concert right after joining the household of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte. This is probably that picture. Caravaggio and the Italians around him fill our tour of Italy's most famous paintings.

03Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, Rembrandt (1653)

Rembrandt painted Aristotle with a Bust of Homer in 1653 for Don Antonio Ruffo, a Sicilian nobleman. Ruffo rarely left Messina and ordered the picture through an agent. It was shipped to his palace there the following summer. Today it hangs in Gallery 616.

Ruffo's inventory called the sitter only a half-length philosopher, possibly Aristotle or Albertus Magnus. Until 1917, writers took him for Ariosto, Tasso, Virgil and others. Look for the medallion of Alexander the Great, Aristotle's royal pupil, on the chain. The picture seems to weigh that kind of worldly success against Homer's lasting achievement.

Rembrandt made it just as his dark palette and heavy paint were going out of fashion in Amsterdam. If you paint, study the sleeves and the chain, where he built the paint up thickly. The Met bought the picture in 1961 at the Parke-Bernet sale of Mrs. Alfred W. Erickson's estate in New York. We cover his other high points in Rembrandt's major works.

04Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, Johannes Vermeer (c. 1662)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Vermeer's Young Woman with a Water Pitcher is only about 18 inches tall, so it is easy to walk past in Gallery 614. A woman stands at an open window with one hand on the casement and the other on a gilt silver pitcher. Linen protects her hair and dress as she begins her morning washing.

It was the first Vermeer to enter an American public collection. Henry G. Marquand bought it in Paris in 1887 and gave it to the Met in 1889.

Technical study shows that the picture was once busier. A larger map first reached to the left behind her, framing her head. The back of a chair also stood at an angle in the left foreground, partly over the window. Vermeer painted both out.

The Met owns five Vermeers, and you can see all of them in the Heilbrunn Timeline's essay on Vermeer. One of them, Study of a Young Woman (about 1665 to 1667), hangs in the same gallery.

Vermeer painted it as a tronie: a face in costume, not a commissioned portrait. In size it nearly matches Girl with a Pearl Earring. To find his other paintings, see where every Vermeer hangs today.

05The Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David (1787)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

David showed The Death of Socrates at the Salon of 1787, two years before the French Revolution. It now hangs in Gallery 634. Convicted of impiety, Socrates chose poison over giving up his beliefs.

Here he points to the heavens, still talking about the immortality of the soul, as he reaches for the hemlock. The disciple holding out the cup cannot bear to watch. David worked from Plato's Phaedo and consulted scholars of antiquity to get the furniture and clothing right.

The old man at the foot of the bed is usually identified as Plato, who was not there that day. David put him in on purpose, as a nod to the author who preserved the story. Look for David's signature on the bench at right, along with the Greek word ATHENAION, "of Athens."

No one knows for sure which of two brothers ordered the canvas: Trudaine de Montigny or Trudaine de la Sablière. With the poet André Chénier, they ran a salon of liberal young Parisians. All three died on the guillotine in 1794.

The Met bought the painting in 1931. A guide to David's major canvases traces his whole career.

European Paintings of the 1800s

06The Dance Class, Edgar Degas (1874)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

The baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure commissioned Degas's The Dance Class in 1873, and Degas delivered it in 1874. The poster on the wall for Rossini's Guillaume Tell is a tribute to Faure, who had starred in that opera. The canvas hangs in Gallery 815.

At right, the ballet master Jules Perrot leans on a long cane while a dancer holds a pose for him. Some twenty-four women, dancers and their mothers, wait their turn around the room. The room itself is imagined: Degas set it in the old Paris Opéra, which had recently burned down.

Faure lent the picture to the 1876 Impressionist exhibition. Mary Cassatt called it "more beautiful than any Ver Meer [sic] I ever saw." A variant belongs to the Musée d'Orsay. Our article on why ballet became Degas's subject tells the longer story.

07Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies, Claude Monet (1899)

Monet bought land with a pond near his property at Giverny in 1893. Late that year he put a Japanese-style footbridge over it. He began a series on the bridge in the summer of 1899, and over that year and the next he painted eighteen versions. Twelve of them went on show at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in 1900.

The Met's Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies hangs in Gallery 819, and three things set it apart. It is one of only two vertical canvases in the series, which gives the lilies a little more room. It lacks the tuft of irises that flanks the bridge at left in every other version from that year. And only four of the bridge's seven supporting bars show.

Louisine and H. O. Havemeyer bought it in 1901, and it came to the Met with her bequest in 1929. His late Water Lilies of 1919 hangs in Gallery 822. Our article on Monet's footbridge series follows the other versions.

08Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat, Vincent van Gogh (1887)

Van Gogh painted more than twenty self-portraits while he lived in Paris, from 1886 to 1888. He was short of money for models, so he sat for himself. Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat hangs in Gallery 825, and it is painted on the back of an earlier peasant study, The Potato Peeler.

He described the habit later, from Arles, in his September 1888 letter to Theo: "I purposely bought a good enough mirror to work from myself, for want of a model." The short strokes of color show that he knew Neo-Impressionist technique and color theory.

He gave the picture away himself around 1887 or 1888, to an owner in Asnières. Adelaide Milton de Groot lent it to the Met and later left it to the museum when she died in 1967.

Gallery 822 holds his Wheat Field with Cypresses, painted on the spot at Saint-Rémy in the summer of 1889. Van Gogh counted it among his "best" summer landscapes. That September he made two studio versions, one of them now in the National Gallery, London. The Met bought the Saint-Rémy canvas from Dieter Bührle in 1993.

Modern and Contemporary Art

09Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso (1905 to 1906)

Picasso's Gertrude Stein hangs in Gallery 965. Stein, an American writer living in Paris, was among the first Americans to embrace the European avant-garde. Her weekly salons filled her apartment with artists and writers, and her early support and friendship were critical to Picasso's success.

He painted her in 1905 and 1906, at the end of his Rose Period. Her body is reduced to simple masses, a hint of the Cubism to come. Her face is set like a mask, with heavy-lidded eyes, after he had seen Iberian sculpture. Picasso gave her the canvas in the autumn of 1906, and she left it to the Met when she died in 1946.

The same department shows Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) in Gallery 899. The drip painting is more than 17 feet wide, and the Met bought it in 1957, the year after his death. Our tour of abstract paintings from Kandinsky to Rothko shows where it fits. For the museum across town, see the modern classics at MoMA.

A route through the paintings at the Met

Begin with Leutze in the American Wing and end with Picasso among the moderns. Gallery numbers for the paintings at the Met change now and then, so check each painting's page on the museum's site before you go. We paint Leutze's river crossing by hand in oil, along with several others on this list and more famous paintings from other museums.

Sources

• The Met Collection: Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware (97.34)
• Dave Kindy, "What's Wrong With This Picture? Washington Crossing the Delaware," HistoryNet
• The Met Collection: John Singer Sargent, Madame X (16.53)
• Stephanie L. Herdrich, "From the Archives: How Madame X Came to The Met," The Met
• Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
• The Met Collection: Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (61.198)
• The Met Collection: Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (89.15.21)
• The Met Collection: Johannes Vermeer, Study of a Young Woman (1979.396.1)
• Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675)
• The Met Collection: Jacques Louis David, The Death of Socrates (31.45)
• The Met Collection: Edgar Degas, The Dance Class (1987.47.1)
• The Met Collection: Claude Monet, Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies (29.100.113)
• The Met Collection: Claude Monet, Water Lilies (1998.325.2)
• The Met Collection: Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat (67.187.70a)
• The Met Collection: Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with Cypresses (1993.132)
• Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, Arles, 16 September 1888 (letter 681), Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, Van Gogh Museum and Huygens ING
• The Met Collection: Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein (47.106)
• The Met Collection: Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (57.92)
• The Met Collection: Caravaggio, The Musicians (52.81)
• The Met Collection: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters (19.164)
• The Met Collection: Velázquez, Juan de Pareja (1971.86)
• The Met Collection: El Greco, View of Toledo (29.100.6)
• The Met Collection: The Temple of Dendur (68.154)