The Cloisters
— — five French abbeys rebuilt above a New York river.
Not only on a wall.
“A medieval monastery on the northern tip of Manhattan, four miles above the Met. John D. Rockefeller Jr. bought the land, bought the stones, and bought the New Jersey palisades across the river so the view would never change. The building incorporates pieces of five French abbeys, taken down stone by stone and shipped over. Inside, the Unicorn Tapestries hang in their own room. Outside, the herb gardens still grow what a twelfth-century cook would have recognised. from the studio
The Cloisters, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Met Cloisters sits in Fort Tryon Park at the northern end of Manhattan, on a bluff sixty-seven metres above the Hudson River. Opened in 1938, it is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's branch devoted to the art and architecture of medieval Europe. The building incorporates architectural elements from five French monastic sites, including the abbeys of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, and Bonnefont-en-Comminges, reassembled around four reconstructed cloister gardens. John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded the museum, donated the land, and bought the New Jersey palisades opposite to protect the view.
The architect Charles Collens worked from George Grey Barnard's earlier collection of medieval fragments and from new acquisitions made through the dealer Joseph Brummer in the 1920s. Limestone capitals from Cuxa, twelfth-century, were reset around a garden planted with the herbs a Benedictine cook would have grown. The Fuentidueña Chapel apse — a Romanesque half-dome from a small Spanish village near Segovia — was loaned to the Met in 1958 in exchange for several frescoes. The masonry colour shifts with the day's light.
The Cloisters is open daily except Wednesday. Admission is included with a Met ticket, which is pay-what-you-wish for residents of New York State and parts of New Jersey and Connecticut and a fixed fee for visitors from elsewhere. The A train to 190th Street, followed by a ten-minute walk through Fort Tryon Park, is the standard approach. The Unicorn Tapestries — seven late-medieval Netherlandish hangings — have their own room. Tryon Park itself is free and worth the loop along the Hudson before or after the museum.