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What's special about these galleries?

Hannah, age 7, finds out about how The Robert Lehman Collection came to be, and why these galleries have a sofa, curtains, and even a fireplace!

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Video transcript

The Metropolitan Museum of Art #metkids q&amp;a Am I in sombody's house? the special rooms of the Robert Lehman Collection Hi, I'm Hannah, and I'm seven years old. I'm Dita. I'm a curator in The Robert Lehman Collection. Why do these rooms look a little different? <i>(Dita Amory) What we do in these exhibition galleries</i> is recreate the feeling of a private house, <i>the house of the collector who bought these objects,</i> <i>and his name was Robert Lehman.</i> <i>So, it's very special and unique.</i> I wanted to ask who made that painting. <i>(Dita) So this is a painting by the famous Spanish painter Goya.</i> He painted for the king, King Charles IV, and he painted portraits of aristocratic families. <i>And, in this case, this portrait of a mother and child,</i> represents one of four portraits of the Altimira family. <i>There's another portrait of a little boy in the family,</i> <i>brother to this infant child,</i> <i>—that's upstairs in our galleries—</i> <i>his name was Manuel.</i> <i>The baby in this portrait's name was María Agustina.</i> I like the way that she is looking this way, <i>and that it looks like she's looking at me</i> <i>while I look at the painting.</i> <i>There's lots of different things in this room,</i> <i>like paintings, sculptures, tables.</i> Why did Robert Lehman collect so many different things? Oh, that's a very good question. <i>From the time he was a very little boy, he traveled to Europe</i> with his mother and father and his sister by steamship and they collected art all over Europe, and he did that every summer as a little boy. <i>So he had a very good start as a collector. </i> And he decided, later in life, <i>that he wanted to keep his collection as a collection.</i> So he made an arrangement with the Metropolitan Museum <i>to leave the collection to the Museum</i> <i>with the understanding that they try to recreate the rooms of his house,</i> so that these rooms give you a feeling of an era from the past <i>when people lived very grandly in New York houses;</i> <i>at least some people did.</i> <i>If the Metropolitan Museum gave you an empty gallery to fill with art,</i> what kind of art would you put in the gallery? In Hannah's gallery? I think I would put in a lot of Pablo Picasso's paintings. <i>(Dita) I think if you had a gallery full of Pablo Picasso's paintings,</i> <i>you'd have lots of visitors.</i> Would you paint the walls white or would you have a color? I would have lime green on the walls. <i>(Dita) Lime green, oh wow!</i> How many guards would you need for your gallery? None. None! what's your @metkids question? ♪ (music) ♪