RHINOSHIELD X THE MET

The Met presents over 5,000 years of art from around the world for everyone to experience and enjoy. Since its founding in 1870, The Met has always aspired to be more than a treasury of rare and beautiful objects. Every day, art comes alive in the Museum's galleries and through its exhibitions and events, revealing new ideas and unexpected connections across time and across cultures.

Cross painted in the Neoimpressionist style that flourished mostly in France between 1886 and 1906. He adapted the technique of applying individual strokes of color (or tâches) in his light-dappled pictures. As his practice evolved and he took up watercolor painting, his brushstrokes became looser, and his colors softened.

This breathtaking composition ensures its reputation as an icon of world art. Hokusai cleverly played with perspective to make Japan’s grandest mountain appear as a small, triangular mound within the hollow of the cresting wave. The artist became famous for his landscapes created using a palette of indigo and imported Prussian blue.

One of Japan's foremost landscapists, Hiroshige designed two extremely popular series, including One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, to which this image belongs.

Government officials of China’s Ming and Qing dynasties wore square badges sewn on the front of their robes. These badges were embroidered with birds for civil officials and animals for military officers—each creature corresponding to a specific rank. A symbol of authority and bravery, the tiger adorned the badge of a senior commander in the Ming dynasty and that of a regimental vice commander in the Qing.

This dynamic dragon (long) surges across a golden ground. The brownish-green thread of the dragon's body and head is made of peacock feathers.

Western forms were commissioned by the Dutch East India Company. Japanese artisans were given either wooden models, European pieces, or drawings to imitate. Here, the Japanese style known as kakiemon is effectively used on a western form.

In the early 1890s, Renoir was invited by the French government to execute a painting for a new museum in Paris, the Musée du Luxembourg, which was to be devoted to the work of living artists. He chose two girls at the piano as his subject. Aware that this piece would be intensely scrutinized, Renoir lavished extraordinary care on this project, developing and refining the composition in a series of five canvases.

Degas painted this ambitious figural composition in 1874. The Dance Class pictures some 24 women—ballerinas and their mothers—waiting as a dancer executes an attitude for her examination by the ballet master Jules Perrot. Degas prepared for this picture with countless drawings made in his studio while dancers posed for him.

Van Gogh was captivated by cypresses during his convalescence at the asylum in Saint-Rémy. This exuberant painting is among his liveliest compositions featuring the towering trees. The ordinarily self-critical artist regarded this painting as one of his "best" summer landscapes.

This celebrated painting—formerly in the personal collection of the Impressionist painter and passionate gardener, Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)—is regarded as one of Cézanne's finest still lifes of the 1890s. It was rare for the artist to depict flowering plants as he does here, which were susceptible to wilting during his careful process.

Composition is an early example of the geometric mode of painting that Mondrian called Neo-Plasticism. For Mondrian, Neo-Plasticism was a universal style because its emphasis on planar relationships could be extended to design and architecture.

This is Seurat’s final study for his monumental painting of Parisians at leisure on an island in the Seine. Contrasting pigments are woven together with small, patchy brushstrokes, whereas in the mural-sized park scene—which debuted two years later at the 1886 Impressionist exhibition—Seurat used tighter, dot-like dabs of paint, a technique which came to be known as Pointillism (from the French word point, or dot). He preferred the term Divisionism—the principle of separating color into small touches placed side-by-side and meant to blend in the eye of the viewer.

A passionate horticulturist, Monet worked on his picturesque water-lily garden at Giverny for years—and depicted it in beloved paintings such as Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies (1899). The evocative work is one of a dozen views of the wooden footbridge over the pond that the Impressionist painter created in the summer of 1899.

Monet spent the summer of 1867 with his family at Sainte-Adresse, a seaside resort near Le Havre. It was there that he painted this buoyant, sunlit scene of contemporary leisure, enlisting his father (shown seated in a panama hat) and other relatives as models. By adopting an elevated viewpoint and painting the terrace, sea, and sky as three distinct bands of high-keyed color, Monet emphasized the flat surface of the canvas. His approach—daring for its time—reflects his admiration for Japanese prints.

The Met's logotype is an original drawing that combines and connects serif and sans serif, classical and modern letterforms. It's fluid, lyrical, and distinctive, like a handwritten signature. Representing 5,000 years of worldwide culture, the elegantly crafted mark looks both to the past and to the future.