Following 10 years of renovation and remodelling of the one of the most popular parts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the newly designed American wing has finally opened its doors for art connoisseurs across the globe.

The elegant wing now showcases popular American painting and sculpture arranged in a thematic and chronological manner. The newly renovated area now contains 26 rooms in 18 of the galleries.

This includes works by great masters, including John Singleton Copley,Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Winslow Homer, Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins and John Singer Sargent among others.

According to Associated Press, new galleries dedicated to American neo-Classical arts opened in 2007 and the period rooms and light-filled Charles Englehard Court atrium with its monumental sculptures and Tiffany glass windows reopened in 2009.

The new architectural design is reportedly a contemporary interpretation of nineteenth-century Beaux-Arts galleries, including coved ceilings and natural light flowing through new skylights.

The centerpiece of the new installation is one of the best-known works in all of American art - Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Apart from this, other subjects, themes and periods presented in the new galleries include: Colonial Portraiture, the American Revolution, the Young Republic, the Civil War Era, Art in the Folk Tradition, the Hudson River School, the West, the Cosmopolitan Spirit and American Impressionism.

The opening of the New American Wing Galleries represents the third and final phase of a major, multi-part $100 million renovation project. Part 1 opened in January 2007 with galleries dedicated to the classical arts of America, part 2 opened in May 2009 with the renovation of The Charles Engelhard Court.

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