The Cloisters

The Cloisters is a museum in Fort Tryon Park, straddling the neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Inwood, in Upper Manhattan, New York City. The museum specializes in European medieval art and architecture, with a focus on the Romanesque and Gothic periods. Governed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it contains a large collection of medieval artworks shown in the architectural settings of French monasteries and abbeys. Its buildings are centered around four cloisters—the Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem, Bonnefont, and Trie-sur-Baïse—that were acquired by American sculptor and art dealer George Grey Barnard in France before 1913 and moved to New York. Barnard's collection was bought for the museum by financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. Other major sources of objects were the collections of J. P. Morgan and Joseph Brummer.