Our night at the Morgan Library in NYC was honestly magic — imagine wandering through rooms stuffed with centuries-old manuscripts by candlelight (okay, electric candlelight, but still romantic) with a mix of summer-garden vibes and highbrow art geekery all around us. No one tells you how surreal it is to chill with Gutenberg Bibles or peer at Oscar Wilde’s actual letters.
Current Morgan Exhibitions
Renoir Drawings just opened, and it’s full of the artist’s lesser-known watercolors, pastels, and sketches. This show isn’t just about pretty faces — there are wild, in-process sketches where you spot Renoir testing ideas for legendary paintings like The Great Bathers. In another gallery, Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings gets weird and dreamy through January 2026.
Permanent Collection Treasures
The permanent stuff basically reads like the greatest hits of literary and human history.
- Handwritten manuscripts by Dickens, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and Hemingway are on display — and, yes, Oscar Wilde’s letters, including “Dorian Gray” drafts.
- Ancient tablets: the library owns fragments about the Great Flood from ancient Mesopotamia, cuneiform and all.
- THREE Gutenberg Bibles — the only place in the world with that many! You can stare at pages dating to 1455 and realize movable type launched modern publishing right in that glass case.
- Glittering medieval and Renaissance manuscripts with gold, dramatic paintings, and intricate illustrations (the Hours of Catherine of Cleves is bananas).
- Rare relics like the Stavelot Triptych, which supposedly includes a scrap of the original True Cross.
Night at the Morgan
Roaming the old Pierpont Morgan’s private office and library is a Gatsby-level experience. Every surface glimmers with some kind of history: Italian Renaissance art, centuries-old Chinese porcelain, medieval bindings — even a diary Queen Victoria scribbled in. It’s impossible not to feel a little bit like a time traveler, especially when mixing towering rooms and secret nooks with lively chatter and the faint smell of ancient paper.
If you get a chance, go at night when the city feels quieter and the library’s architectural wonders glow.
Stick the Morgan Library on your must-do NYC list — you’ll never look at “old books” the same way again