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The Cloisters

As a museum, the Cloisters is unique in New York as its collection extends to include the architecture of the building that houses it. The second of the Metropolitan's museums, the structure is an ensemble of four cloisters and three chapels brought to New York from Europe.

The collection is founded on American sculptor George Gray Barnard's personal holdings of medieval objects. Barnard had established a medieval art museum in Upper Manhattan, but constantly prone to financial mismanagement, he was forced to sell his preliminary medieval museum to John D. Rockefeller in 1925 to avoid bankruptcy. Rockefeller established the Cloisters as part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1938 on the newly purchased land of Fort Tryon Park.

This story takes us through the history of the four cloisters that make up the museum.

By

Urban Archive

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The Cloisters (1914)

The Cloisters (1914)

Barnard's original museum, as seen in this postcard, was founded so "the 'Spirit of Gothic' could once more cast its spell." At the time he began collecting these fragments in the early 20th century, they were largely scattered from their original settings. Barnard kept a portion of his collection in France until the French senate impeded the exportation of historical monuments in 1913. He opened his own museum, pictured here, on 190th Street in 1914.

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The Cloisters

The Cloisters

The Cloisters is essentially a patchwork of ecclesiastical and secular buildings from the acquisitions of both Barnard and Rockefeller. Its location was chosen as "the only spot in New York remote enough to approximate the lonely setting of a monastery," according to the Met's records. Rockefeller bought up an additional area of coastal land across the river in New Jersey to preserve the view from the Cloisters.

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The Cloisters

The Cloisters

A cloister is a covered walkway that surrounds an open-air courtyard and connects spaces of a monastery. The cloister was the center of activity of monastic life, where monks would meditate, bathe, and read aloud. This architectural feature allowed monks to enjoy abundant light, providing a contrast to the cavernous, dark quality of the inside of a chapel or cathedral.

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The Cloisters

The Cloisters

This cloister, called Trie, or Trie-sur-Baïse, originates from an area near Toulouse. Much of the original structure was destroyed by iconoclastic Huguenots in 1571. Twenty-eight original capitals of the cloister changed hands before being sold to the city of Tarbes in 1889 and 1890, and eighteen of them are now part of The Cloisters. The garden in the courtyard imitates those seen on medieval tapestries.

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The Cloisters

The Cloisters

Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa forms the center of the Cloisters. It comes from a Benedictine monastery built in the 9th century in the Catalan region, near the border of France and Spain. The monastery was abandoned during the French Revolution and later the sculptural capitals from the cloister were sold to Barnard. To reconstruct this cloister, Barnard had the same Languedoc marble that the original builders would have used quarried from the same mountainous region in southern France.

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The Cloisters

The Cloisters

Cuxa incorporates a garden at its center, as do three of the other cloisters at the museum. This element is a nod to historical gardens of the medieval period, and most of the gardens utilize flora native to the region of the cloister's original location.

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The Cloisters

The Cloisters

Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert was retrieved from a 9th-century Benedictine abbey near Montpellier, France. During the French Revolution, the monastery was deserted and elements were dispersed, largely ending up in the hands of locals. Barnard collected over 140 elements from this cloister for his own collection in the early 1910s. Notably, some columns here have capitals that resemble Hops, the plant used to brew a staple of the monastic diet: beer.

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Fort Tryon Park

Fort Tryon Park

Bonnefont or Bonnefont-en-Comminges was an abbey founded in 1136 in Burgundy. The abbey's archives were burned and its buildings were demolished during the French Revolution. Fragments saved by local residents were obtained by J.P. Morgan, Joseph Brummer, and Barnard to reassemble this cloister.

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Fort Tryon Park

Fort Tryon Park

The garden at the center of the Bonnefont cloister hosts a variety of medieval herbs, organized by use. The plants are in raised beds, much like they would have been in medieval times.

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The Cloisters

The Cloisters

The Cloisters remain a much-coveted medieval respite in Manhattan. The museum's atmosphere, decidedly calm and contemplative, attracts over 300,000 visitors per year.

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