The search for the next director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is accelerating. The departing director, Philippe de Montebello, has said that he would like to leave the Met at the end of this year. Now, with summer looming as a probable two-month hiatus in the search committee’s discussions, the committee is under pressure to narrow the field of candidates before its members leave town.

Last month, the headhunters who are handling the search, Phillips Oppenheim’s Sarah James and Laurie Nash, gave the committee a list of names to consider. The Web logger Lee Rosenbaum, aka CultureGrrl, reported recently that her sources suggested the list had 12 names on it, including those of the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Timothy Rub; the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, Timothy Potts; the director of the National Galleries of Scotland, John Leighton, and two internal candidates, the Met’s curator of 19th-century, Modern, and Contemporary art, Gary Tinterow, and the chairman of the department of European sculpture and decorative arts, Ian Wardropper.

A spokesman for the Met, Harold Holzer, speculated at a press lunch last week that the committee would try to come up with a short list before leaving for the summer.

After The New York Sun mentioned Mr. Rub as a potential candidate last month, he reassured his hometown newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, that he was “not a candidate” for the job. However, when the Sun last week asked him, through an assistant, if he had been contacted by Ms. James and Ms. Nash, Mr. Rub declined to comment. Asked the same question, Messrs. Potts and Leighton also declined to say whether they had been approached. Mr. Wardropper similarly declined to respond to inquiries about his interest in the job, and Mr. Tinterow was traveling and not reachable by deadline.

One person was willing to comment, at least obliquely, on her interest in the position was the Met’s curator of American decorative arts, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen. “All I can tell you is there have been several people from various areas who have suggested it to me, and said that they have suggested it to the search committee,” Ms. Frelinghuysen said. Ms. Frelinghuysen is a descendant by marriage of Louisine Havemeyer, who bequeathed her substantial collection of Impressionist art to the Met.

Asked if she had heard of any other women mentioned as potential candidates, Ms. Frelinghuysen said no. “I wish there were some,” she said, adding that, with the recent death of the longtime director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Anne d’Harnoncourt, and the announcement that Mimi Gates will soon retire as director of the Seattle Art Museum, the number of female directors at prominent institutions is dwindling.

Each of the individuals whose names have been mentioned has both advantages and drawbacks as a future director for the Met. Mr. Potts has both a scholarly and a business background. Originally from Sydney, he earned a doctorate in Near Eastern art and archaeology from Oxford, then worked at Lehman Brothers in New York for several years, before returning to Australia to become the director of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. But his recent tenure as director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, was marred by bad relations with the press and, reportedly, the Kimbell’s board. If he were offered the Met job, he would have to decide whether to leave the Fitzwilliam, where he only arrived in January.

Similarly, Mr. Leighton has been in his current post less than two and a half years. He was previously the director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. In partnership with the Tate, the National Galleries of Scotland recently acquired, for $52 million, a vast collection of Modern and Contemporary art amassed by the dealer Anthony d’Offay. Mr. Leighton has suggested that the museum needs a new building to show the d’Offay collection, while spearheading a plan, in the meantime, to tour parts of the collection around Britain.

Mr. Leighton’s primary liability may be that, as a European director, he has not proven himself in the highly competitive world of private fund raising. European museums, unlike American ones, get much of their funding from government.

As for Mr. Tinterow and Mr. Wardropper, the search committee may hesitate to choose someone who has not previously run a museum. Although Mr. Montebello began his career as a curator at the Met, he did not ascend directly to his current job; he was first the director, for several years, of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

One American director whose name has come up in relation to the Met post told the Sun that was not interested in the job. The director of the Harvard Art Museum, Thomas Lentz, said through a spokesman that he was approached by Ms. James and Ms. Nash in April and that he informed them that he did not wish to be considered for the Met position. Mr. Lentz has a Ph.D. from Harvard in Islamic art.