A credit line reading simply "Purchase, 1871" follows a number of paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's European galleries — a reference to the museum's founding purchase of 174 paintings in 1871, per the museum. That one line is the densest thing in the gallery: a full history of how the work arrived, compressed to two words and a year. Wall labels reward the attention.
Most labels in New York museums follow the same grammar, and once the grammar is visible, the label becomes the most informative square foot in the room. Here is how to parse it.
What are the parts of a wall label?
The first block identifies the work: the artist's name and life dates, the title in italics, the date of the work, and the medium — oil on canvas, marble, gelatin silver print. Dimensions may follow. The second block is the credit line and the accession number, the museum's inventory code. Extended wall texts and interpretive panels sit beside, not within, this core.
Read the first block for what the work is; read the second for what it has been through since. A date range instead of a single year often signals an artist's reworking; "attributed to" or "workshop of" signals a curatorial qualification that is itself information.
How do you read a label in four steps?
- Artist and dates. Establish who made it and when they lived; the dates place the work in a life.
- Title, date, medium. The italic title is the museum’s form of the name; the medium tells you what surface and technique to look for.
- Credit line. Establish how it arrived — gift, bequest, purchase — and who is credited.
- Accession number. Photograph it; it is the key to the object’s full record online.
Related stories: How the Met rehung its European paintings, and how to read the new galleries · Whitney Biennial 2026 carries the museum's summer, floor by floor.
Why do credit lines differ from one label to the next?
Because they record different ways art enters a collection. "Gift of" names a living donor; "Bequest of" names one made at death; "Purchase" records a buying decision, often followed by the fund that paid for it; "Gift of X, by exchange" traces a deaccessioned work traded toward the acquisition. Museums are required to credit donors as the gift agreements specify, which is why some credit lines run long.
The Met's "Purchase, 1871" is the type specimen: it documents the buying trip on which the young museum acquired its first European paintings, and it still travels with those works through every rehang, including the current installation of the European Paintings galleries that reopened in November 2023.
What is an accession number?
The number at the bottom of a label — a sequence of digits separated by periods — is the object's catalog identity, assigned when it enters the collection. In many museums, the first segment records the year of accession, so a number beginning "14." often means the object arrived in 1914. The number is how registrars track a work across loans, conservation and storage, and how visitors can find the same object on the museum's website long after the wall text comes down.
Photographing the label, or the number alone, is the most reliable way to keep a list of what was actually seen. Search engines handle artist and title poorly; the accession number is exact.
What is not on the label?
Provenance, for one — the chain of ownership before the museum, which museums increasingly publish in online collection records rather than on the wall. Exhibition history and bibliography also live online. The label is an identification card, not a dossier; the wall text nearby carries interpretation, and the online record carries the archive.
One more distinction worth knowing: permanent collection labels describe works the museum owns, while temporary exhibition labels describe loans, which is why their credit lines name other museums, foundations and private collectors instead. A gallery of "private collection" labels is a gallery that will disperse when the show closes.