A Romanesque Chapter House in America - Romanesque Architecture on Waymarking.com

The abbey at Pontaut, founded in 1115 as a Benedictine monastery, housed a Cistercian community after 1151. In 1791, the monastic buildings were sold to a local family, and the chapter house was converted into a stable.

Fast-forward 120 years and George Grey Barnard, a student of Rodin, was studying in rural France. Barnard supplemented his income by locating and selling medieval sculpture and architectural fragments that had made their way into the hands of local landowners.

Barnard moved back to the United States on the eve of World War I and, at the northern tip of Manhattan, opened a museum housing his own collection of medieval art, which included numerous pieces of architecture that had been gleaned from four historic cloisters in France: the Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem, Bonnefont and Trie. He called his installation "George Grey Barnard’s Cloisters."

When Barnard’s Cloisters was offered for sale in 1924, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. provided funds that enabled The Metropolitan Museum of Art to purchase the museum and its collections.

By 1927, The Met decided a larger building was needed for this new branch museum and hired architect Charles Collins to incorporate the remnants of the four cloisters, as well as remnants of several abbeys, chapels, monasteries and refectories into one large building.

Construction of the exterior began in 1935. The stonework, primarily of limestone and granite from several European sources.

The chapter house from Notre-Dame at Pontaut was incorporated with elements from the Romanesque Cathédrale Notre-Dame-du-Bourg de Digne into what is now referred to by the museum as "The Langon Chapel." Although the chapter house arrived in New York almost in its entirety, a modern floor was needed (modeled after a twelfth-century floor tile), as were new webs (in reinforced concrete) between the vaulted ribs of the ceiling. Otherwise this section of the museum is one of the truest to its original layout and construction, thanks to methodical documentation rendered during its deconstruction.

The Chapter House can be located in the NorthWest corner of the main cloister garden in the museum.

Romanesque or Pre-Romanesque: Romanesque Web site proof of Romanesque or Pre-Romanesque features: [Web Link] Date of origin: 1115 Architect(s) if known: Unknown Type of building (structure): Abbey/Monastery Address: 99 Margaret Corbin Dr, New York, NY 10040

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