Shady Ladies Tours is a new kind of tour company…one that puts the fun back into art! Our tours take you to places that other tours don’t and show you the artworks that other tours won’t—complete with the sexy, intriguing, and scandalous backstories that cast the history of art in an entirely new light. After all, you’re an adult now—so it’s time they let you in on the secrets!

As you’ll discover on our tours, gender and sexual desire are key themes in almost every period and culture. From castrati and courtesans to Near Eastern harems and the official mistresses of European kings, every age has dealt with sexuality and gender in its own unusual and fascinating way. Tours offered by Shady Ladies are your chance to learn about all of this, and to see even familiar works and periods of art history in a whole new light.

We launched our company in 2016 with the original Shady Ladies tour of the Metropolitan Museum. Since then, we have branched out: we now have seven different tours of the Met, as well as Shady Ladies tours of the MFA in Boston and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; a Women’s History Walking Tour of Greenwich Village; and two fabulous tours of Paris, the six day Shady Ladies tour, and the four day Let Them Eat Cake tour!

The Met, however, still remains our spiritual home: not only does it have one of the world’s greatest art collections, it’s also one of the very few museums that covers the whole history of art, with works from every period, culture and  genre. As a result, it is a great museum in which to explore cultural history—and it also happens to have an amazing collection of works related to women.

• Our Shady Ladies of the Metropolitan tour is an assembly of courtesans, mistresses, and professional beauties throughout the ages, from ancient Greek hetaerae to Sargent’s Madame X.
• Learn all about power and politics with Nasty Women of the Metropolitan: women who shattered glass ceilings in Ancient Egypt, Imperial Rome, Revolutionary France and so many other times and places.
• See the museum a whole new way on Dressed to Kill, our fashion and beauty tour—because they might as well call it the Metropolitan Museum of Fashion. From African nose rings to foot-high wigs and centuries of different corsets, follow the changing standards of “beauty” in many cultures and the lengths to which artists and sitters have gone to live up to them.
• Scandals and Secrets of the Metropolitan takes you on a path through the museum, from scandal to scandal through the centuries—from masturbating monkeys in the Greek galleries to the greatest pay-for-play scandal of Renaissance Florence to the missing shoulder strap that almost ended John Singer Sargent’s career!
• Unhung Heroes of the Met is a tour no other company would run—a tour about the male member in art.  It was suggested when NPR asked to interview Professor Lear about the topic, and we took it from there:  it’s a major theme in art and tells you a lot about cultural values and views of masculinity.
• And don’t miss our holiday special tours, Greek Love Myths, for Valentine’s Day, and Fright Night for Halloween.  Both are so popular that we give them occasionally throughout the year.  Learn about the Greek myths about love and sex that have fueled the artistic imagination for two and a half millennia, and find out about what’s lurking in the Met’s dim corners—headhunters’ hooks, jars of embalming fluid.  The Met has it all, and the place to learn about it is on Shady Ladies tours!

Join our art museum tours for an adventure like no other, where high art meets desire, culture meets power—and you gain a completely new understanding of history and art.