9 Must-See Famous Paintings at the Met: 2026 Room Guide

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, or the Met, is so big that it helps to have a plan. This list of nine famous paintings at the Met starts with George Washington in a small boat on an icy river. Then it moves through Rembrandt, Vermeer and David to Degas, Monet, Van Gogh and Picasso. Several of them are also on our page of the world's best-known paintings. The chart below turns the nine into one walk, from the American Wing to the modern galleries, with the gallery number and a detail to find at each stop.

The nine are grouped the way the Met groups its own galleries: the American Wing, the European paintings and the modern art. We also tell you where each one hangs. We checked every gallery number on the Met's website on October 17, 2026.

A walking route through the Met's famous paintings

Gallery numbers come from the Met's own pages as of October 17, 2026, and the museum moves works now and then.

Three extra stops fit along the way. Gallery 620 has Caravaggio's The Musicians, Gallery 822 has Monet's later Water Lilies, and Gallery 899 has Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (Number 30).

The American Wing

01Washington Crossing the Delaware, Emanuel Leutze (1851)

Washington Crossing the Delaware is more than 21 feet wide, which makes it the biggest painting on this list. It hangs in Gallery 760 of the American Wing. Emanuel Leutze painted this American scene in Germany, where he signed it in 1851.

Leutze painted the crossing 75 years after it happened, and he got a lot of it wrong. The writer Dave Kindy listed the mistakes for the history website HistoryNet, and the first one is the flag. Washington's soldiers flew a flag called the Grand Union, not the Stars and Stripes. Their boats were also bigger and flat on the bottom, and they crossed the river around midnight in a snowstorm.

Still, it is worth looking closely at the people in the boat. On the Met's audio guide, the Mohawk historian Scott Manning Stevens points out soldiers, farmers and an African American man. At the back, he finds a Native American man in clothes fairly close to those of the Northeast Woodlands. You can see more American favorites in our tour of famous American paintings.

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

Madame X hangs in Gallery 771, also in the American Wing. Today it is one of the most famous portraits in Western art, but in 1884 it nearly ruined John Singer Sargent's career. The woman in the picture was Virginie Gautreau. She was born in Louisiana, and in Paris she was known for her artful look.

Nobody had asked Sargent to paint her. He hoped the portrait would win him praise and new clients at the Salon, the big official art show in Paris. Instead, the crowd laughed at it. People were shocked by her skin color and her makeup. They were also shocked by a jeweled strap that had slipped off her right shoulder. Gautreau and her mother begged Sargent to take the picture down, but he said no. After the show closed, he repainted the strap, and he kept the painting in his studio.

He held on to it for more than 30 years. Then, in January 1916, he wrote to the Met's director to offer it for sale. In that letter he said this about the painting:

“I suppose it is the best thing I have done.”

Once the sale was agreed, Sargent asked the museum not to use her name. His reason was "the row I had with the lady years ago." A row is a quarrel, and that is why the museum's papers called her Madame X.

European Paintings before 1800

This part of the museum also has Caravaggio's The Musicians from 1597, in Gallery 620. Look for the second boy from the right, because that is the painter himself. Caravaggio once joined the household of a church leader, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte. A writer of his time, Giovanni Baglione, said Caravaggio painted a concert right after that, and this is probably that very picture. You can meet Caravaggio and the painters around him in 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 a nobleman in Sicily named Don Antonio Ruffo. Today it hangs in Gallery 616. A bust is a statue of a person's head and shoulders. Here Aristotle rests his hand on a bust of the poet Homer.

For a long time, though, people weren't sure who the man was. Ruffo's own list of his paintings called him only a philosopher, maybe Aristotle and maybe someone else. Until 1917, writers guessed he was the poet Virgil or one of several other famous men. Now look at his gold chain, where you can find a medal with the face of Alexander the Great. Alexander was a king, and Aristotle had been his teacher. So the painting seems to weigh the kind of success a king can have against the lasting fame of Homer's poems.

Rembrandt made this picture just as his dark colors and thick paint were going out of style in Amsterdam. The sleeves and the chain are worth a long look, because that is where you can see how thickly he built up the paint. You can see more of his work in our guide to Rembrandt's most famous paintings.

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. That makes it easy to walk past in Gallery 614. A woman stands at an open window. One hand is on the window, and the other is on a silver pitcher covered in gold. She wears white linen to keep her hair and her dress safe, because she is starting her morning wash.

This was the first Vermeer to go to a public museum in America, and it came to the Met in 1889. When experts studied the layers of paint, they found that the picture used to be busier. At first a bigger map hung behind her and framed her head. The back of a chair also stood at an angle in the front left corner. Later Vermeer painted over both of them.

The Met owns five Vermeers, and a second one hangs in the same gallery. Study of a Young Woman is not a portrait that someone paid for. Instead, it shows a face in a costume, which is a kind of picture called a tronie. It is almost the same size as Girl with a Pearl Earring. To find the rest of his paintings, see where every Vermeer hangs today.

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

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Jacques-Louis David showed The Death of Socrates at the Salon of 1787, two years before the French Revolution. Today it hangs in Gallery 634. Socrates was a great thinker of the ancient world, and he was found guilty of not respecting the gods. He chose to drink poison rather than give up what he believed.

In the painting he reaches for the cup of poison, and with his other hand he points up toward the sky. He is still talking about how the soul lives forever. The student who holds out the cup can't bear to watch. David read Plato's book about that day, the Phaedo. He also asked experts on the ancient world to help him get the furniture and the clothes right.

Plato is in the picture too. He is usually thought to be the old man at the foot of the bed, though he wasn't there that day. David put him in on purpose to honor the writer who saved the story. While you look, find David's signature on the bench at the right, next to a Greek word that means "of Athens." You can follow the rest of his career in a guide to David's major paintings.

European Paintings of the 1800s

06The Dance Class, Edgar Degas (1874)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

An opera singer named Jean-Baptiste Faure asked Edgar Degas to paint The Dance Class in 1873. Degas finished it in 1874, and it hangs in Gallery 815. The poster on the wall is for an opera called Guillaume Tell. It is there to honor Faure, who had starred in that opera.

On the right, the ballet master Jules Perrot leans on a long cane while a dancer holds a pose for him. Around the room, about twenty-four women wait their turn, and they are dancers and their mothers. But you could never have stood in this room. That is because Degas set it in the old Paris Opera house, which had burned down not long before.

Faure lent the painting to the Impressionist show of 1876. The painter Mary Cassatt said it was more beautiful than any Vermeer she had ever seen. Our article on why ballet became Degas's subject tells the longer story.

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

In 1893 Claude Monet bought land with a pond near his home in Giverny, France. Late that year he put a Japanese-style footbridge over it. In the summer of 1899 he began to paint the bridge again and again. He made eighteen versions over that year and the next. The Met's Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies is one of them, and it hangs in Gallery 819.

Three things make this one different from the others. It is one of only two tall canvases in the series, so the lilies get a little more room. Every other version from that year has iris flowers beside the bridge on the left, but this one doesn't. And if you count the bars that hold up the bridge, you will see only four of the seven.

Many years later, in 1924, Monet told Marc Elder how he came to love his pond:

“A landscape does not get under your skin in one day. And then all of a sudden I had the revelation of how enchanting my pond was. I took up my palette. Since then I’ve hardly had any other subject.”

His much later Water Lilies, from 1919, hangs in Gallery 822. Our article on Monet's Japanese bridge paintings follows the other versions of the bridge.

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

While Vincent van Gogh lived in Paris, from 1886 to 1888, he painted more than twenty pictures of himself. He was short of money to pay models, so he used his own face. This one hangs in Gallery 825, and at about 16 inches tall it is the smallest painting on this list.

Later, in a letter to his brother Theo in 1888, he explained the habit. He wrote that he had bought a good mirror on purpose, so that he could paint himself when he had no model.

Look at how the face, the hat and the background are built from short strokes of blue, orange and yellow. Those strokes show that he knew the color ideas of a group of painters called the Neo-Impressionists. There is a surprise on the other side, too. He painted it on the back of an older picture, a study of a farm worker called The Potato Peeler.

Modern and Contemporary Art

09Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso (1905 to 1906)

Pablo Picasso's portrait Gertrude Stein hangs in Gallery 965. Stein was an American writer who lived in Paris. She was one of the first Americans to welcome the bold new art being made in Europe. Every week she filled her apartment with artists and writers. Her early help and friendship were very important to Picasso's success.

He painted her in 1905 and 1906. Her body is made of simple, heavy shapes, and that is an early hint of Cubism, the style that came next. Her face is set like a mask, with heavy eyelids. He painted it that way after he had seen ancient sculpture from Iberia, the land of today's Spain and Portugal. Picasso gave her the painting in the autumn of 1906, and when she died in 1946, she left it to the Met.

The same part of the museum shows Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) in Gallery 899. Pollock made it by dripping paint, and it is more than 17 feet wide. 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 famous paintings at the Met

Start with Leutze in the American Wing and finish with Picasso in the modern galleries. Gallery numbers change now and then, so check each painting's page on the Met's website before you go. We paint Leutze's river crossing by hand in oil, and several others on this list too. We also paint 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)