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The Metropolitan Museum of Art began as an idea born in Paris in eighteen sixty-six, when a group of American travelers met for a Fourth of July dinner. These men envisioned a national gallery that would bring art and education to the United States on a scale that rivaled the great institutions of Europe. By the time they incorporated the museum in eighteen seventy, they had no building, no staff, and not a single work of art to display. They started their collection from scratch, later acquiring a Roman marble sarcophagus as their very first object, which helped signal their intent to build a repository of antiquity.