Seeing with the mind and heart: Patrick Bringley on life after All the Beauty in the World

For author Patrick Bringley, 2008 was a life-altering year. He got married, settling in Sunset Park with his wife — and he lost his older brother to cancer. Seeking solace in stillness and beauty, Bringley quit his job at The New Yorker magazine to become a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His decade there was the basis of his best-selling memoir, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, published in 2023. Profound, and at times funny, it is a chronicle of art, grief, and the inner workings of an iconic institution.

The Sunset Post sat down with Bringley at Internet and Coffee, not far from the co-op where he lives with his wife and two kids, to talk about his journey from aspiring writer to museum guard, memoirist, and beyond.

Bringley started working in the event planning department at The New Yorker soon after college, hoping to break in by writing book reviews and Talk of the Town pieces. But after his brother’s death, his priorities shifted. “I didn't want to just run back to some office job and jam myself back into the forward motion of life,” Bringley said. “I loved the idea of being someplace that was spacious, that had room for your thoughts and room for feelings.”

He found that spaciousness in the Met’s maze of galleries and lofty wings displaying art from across the centuries and around the world. And much of the art, Bringley says, was “about life and death and suffering, and the sorts of things we confront in our own lives.”

Even with the museum’s streams of visitors, Bringley had plenty of time to commune with the art. In his book, he describes his encounters with some of the work that affected him most, including Italian Renaissance paintings, a 14th-century Iranian prayer niche, quilts made by women descended from enslaved people in Alabama, and much more. For Bringley, these works were invitations to pause and reckon with something beyond words, and doing so left him feeling more openhearted and connected.

He also found something at the Met that he wasn’t looking for: a community. The museum employs hundreds of guards — “from five boroughs and five continents” — bound together by their standard-issue navy blue suits and gold lapel pins. Bringley came to deeply value the friendship and camaraderie of his fellow guards, whether they were commiserating about the hard marble floors (a day in the galleries with wood floors was much easier on the feet) or celebrating the births of his children after work at the pub.

Under the daily influence of art and community, along with the responsibilities and joys of parenting, Bringley’s grief began to lift. He started thinking about what might come next in his life, eventually leaving his job at the Met. Reconnecting with his aspirations as a writer, he decided to turn his experiences there into a memoir.

In the wake of his book’s success, Bringley has been able to build a sustainable worklife sharing his perspective on art. He gives tours of the Met, travels to museums around the country to speak, and last year, he performed his one-man show based on the book Off Broadway.

Now he is in the early stages of writing a new book, about seeing — “not just with the eyes, but with the mind and the heart.” Part memoir, it will be about art, but also about how we see the world itself, incorporating conversations with people who are as interested in, for example, clouds, as someone else might be interested in the paintings of Raphael.

Bringley visits the Met often, not only to give tours, but also to see his friends who still work there — and, of course, to see the art. He’s looking forward to the blockbuster Raphael exhibit this spring, but most of all he likes to explore the permanent collection, which he hasn’t come close to exhausting. “Nobody has. Nobody,” Bringley says. “I mean, the director of that place doesn't know more than a tiny sliver of what's in it.”

What Bringley does know, he carries with him into his life. Asked if there’s a work of art he associates with Sunset Park, he quickly lands on an old favorite: “The Harvesters” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The 16th-century Flemish painting shows a golden field and the people who work it — some harvesting, others eating together, one conspicuously napping. Beyond the field, the landscape recedes in layers toward the harbor, dotted with distant people engaged in their own activities.

Drawing out the comparison, Bringley says, “If you go into Sunset Park, it’s every bit as expansive, and every bit as lush when you get the colors of the sun going down over the harbor.” And in the park, as in the painting, people coexist in a shared space, at once together and separate. “You're with your family,” he said, “and people are flying kites, and the ladies over there are doing aerobics, and these people are having a picnic… There’s a feeling of life being lived.”