A Meditation on Art

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

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The Harvesters 1565 Pieter Bruegel the Elder

If you haven’t had the opportunity to read All the Beauty in the World - The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley, we encourage you to pick it up.

While attempting to navigate the grief of losing his 27-year old brother to cancer, Bringley (two years younger) gave up a promising position at the New Yorker to immerse himself in the most beautiful place he knew—the Metropolitan Museum of Art—as a security guard. He writes, “My heart is full, my heart is breaking, and I badly want to stand still a while.”

Throughout his ten years at the museum, Bringley immersed himself in the immense diversity of paintings, sculptures, religious relics, antiquities. He found in them insights, both healing and piercing. He found a rhythm in his daily work that restored his equilibrium.

More than a personal memoir, Bringley also gives us interesting behind-scenes glimpses of the workings of the Met—…