THE SUNDAY TIMES ART BOOK OF THE YEAR
A Financial Times Best Book of 2023

A revelatory portrait of a great museum and the moving story of one guard's quest to find solace and meaning in art

'Who would have thought that the outstanding art book of you would have been written not by a curator or an art historian or even an artist - but by a museum guard?' Sunday Times

When Patrick's older brother dies at twenty-six, all he wants is to retreat. So, he does. He quits his job and seeks refuge in the most beautiful place he can think of: New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

All the Beauty in the World recounts Patrick's time as a museum guard, keeping quiet vigil over some of our greatest treasures and uncovering the Met's innermost secrets. As his connection to the art and the life that swirls around it grows, so does Patrick - and gradually he emerges transformed by heartbreak, community and the power of art to illuminate life in all its pain, pleasure and hope.

'As luminous as the old masters paintings' Daily Mail
**'Consoling and beautiful'** Guardian
**'Marvellous'** Daily Telegraph
**'A beautiful tale about beauty. It is also a tale about grief, balancing solitude and comradeship, and finding joy in both the exalted and the mundane'** Washington Post

Autorentext

Patrick Bringley

Klappentext

A moving, revelatory portrait of one of the world's great museums and its treasures by a writer who spent a decade as a museum guard.

Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They're the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he'd be one of them. Then his older brother died of cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew.

To his surprise and the reader's delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley's home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards-a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns.