Vintage NYC Art Print — 1920s Metropolitan Museum Arms — New York Wall Decor

The knights have been standing there for a century. In 1927 Tony Sarg drew them.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Arms and Armor gallery is one of New York's most quietly extraordinary rooms. Most visitors encounter it by accident — wandering through from one wing to another — and stop without meaning to. The mounted knights in full plate armor have that effect. They've been stopping people cold since the museum acquired them in the nineteenth century.

Tony Sarg drew this room in 1927 as part of his illustrated folio of New York at the height of the Jazz Age. He chose the bird's-eye perspective he used throughout the collection — looking down at the gallery from above, the knights massive in the foreground, visitors circling them at ground level, an artist sketching in the lower right corner with an easel and a canvas. Someone in this illustration is making art about art, in a room full of objects made by craftsmen who died five hundred years ago.

The hall has been reorganized and renovated many times since 1927. The specific arrangement Sarg drew no longer exists. But the knights are still there — the same knights, in the same museum, on the same stretch of Fifth Avenue — and people are still stopping to look at them on their way through to somewhere else.

This print is part of the complete Gaslight Prints series of all 24 Tony Sarg New York illustrations, reproduced from the original 1927 folio and printed on archival matte paper. Sarg — best known today as the father of modern puppetry and the creator of the first Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon floats — produced these illustrations as a love letter to a city that never stood still.

Available in 12x16 and 18x24. Free shipping. Unframed.