Metropolitan Museum of Art Highlights Guided Tour with Admission

Two hours, one English-speaking guide and a route through the works that made the Met's name. Admission is included in the booking, so there is no ticket to sort out on the day; like every visitor, you still go through the security check at the entrance. The group meets at the Pharaoh statue in the Great Hall at the scheduled time. The collection covers 5,000 years, and the point of this tour is to cut that down to the pieces most people come for. First stop is the Egyptian galleries and the Temple of Dendur, built around 15 to 10 BC under the emperor Augustus, when Egypt was a Roman province. From there the route crosses to the American Wing for Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware, a picture that became shorthand for American independence. The European paintings come next: Vermeer and Rembrandt for the Baroque, Monet, Van Gogh and Degas for Impressionism, with the guide explaining what each movement changed. The operator also lists modern art, with names like Picasso and Jackson Pollock, but the Met's modern and contemporary galleries are closed until 2030 while the new Tang Wing is built. That part of the route depends on what is on view elsewhere in the museum that day: Pollock's Autumn Rhythm, for example, is in the exhibition Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous from October 4, 2026 to January 31, 2027. The tour ends in the Greek and Roman galleries, inside a reconstructed bedroom from a Roman villa at Boscoreale, near Pompeii. Its walls were painted around 50 to 40 BC, and the eruption of Vesuvius buried the villa more than a century later. The Met is always restoring and rehanging something, so the itinerary can change. When a work is off view, the guide swaps in a comparable piece from the same period. The museum itself does not guarantee that every gallery is open on a given day, and single galleries can close at short notice: the Temple of Dendur was shut for a few days at the end of September 2026 before it reopened. If one room is the reason you are booking, check the museum's gallery closures page before you go. The museum is closed on Wednesdays.