ABSTRACT
This essay explores the symbiotic relationship between William Wetmore Story and the Metropolitan Museum of Art during the 1870s and 1880s. As civic-minded Americans laid the foundations for public museums, a growing number of artists and critics celebrated that art was no longer a private, domestic matter but a public concern carried out by male professionals free from feminine, sentimental biases. Story’s monumental sculptures (Cleopatra, Polyxena, Medea, and Semiramis), installed at the entrance of the new museum, present the domestic sphere as a realm of dangerous, unbridled emotions, suggesting that civilization, order, and enlightenment flowed from male-dominated, professionally organized public institutions.