Then in 1941 the museum bought a Diego Velázquez portrait of the Infanta Margarita of Spain, which was possibly a examine for a bigger portrait of her in Vienna. Other major benefactors in the course of the museum’s first quarter century were Archer M. Huntington and Mr. and Mrs. Henry Timken, whose small art collection is housed in the nearby Timken Museum of Art, established in 1965. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s second president, Henry Gurdon Marquand. In 1896, the Museum trustees acknowledged this contact form Marquand’s vast contributions to the establishment by commissioning this portrait by John Singer Sargent. The museum first opened on February 20, 1872, housed in a building positioned at 681 Fifth Avenue. John Taylor Johnston, a railroad government whose private art assortment seeded the museum, served as its first president, and the writer George Palmer Putnam came on board as its founding superintendent.
