The women, the gardens, and the lights of Paris have arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Americans in Paris,” a traveling exhibition on the final leg of a three-city tour, opens at the museum Tuesday. A select group got a first peek Monday.

Foot traffic flowed toward the most popular works in the show: The bulk of the guests lingered in the first four rooms, while the later galleries remained empty.

“It was like that in Boston,” a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and one of the chief organizers of the exhibit, Erica Hirshler, said. “We often had a bottleneck in the middle of the show. That’s where the showstoppers are.”

The showstoppers include John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X” (1884) and “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” (1882), as well as James McNeill Whistler’s “Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl” (1862).

An employee at Bank of America (who sponsored the exhibit), Meg Galistinos, stood in front of “The White Girl” for several minutes. “Her gown is so full,” Ms. Galistinos said.

The room receiving the least attention was the final one displaying American scenes painted after artists had returned here from Paris. Perhaps it was just too familiar.

“I haven’t had as much time in the exhibit as I would like,” a museum board member, Lulu Wang, said. She’d cut short her first walk-through earlier in the day to attend a board meeting, and at the preview, she spent the first 40 minutes shaking hands on the reception line alongside the president of the museum, Emily Rafferty; the northeast president of Bank of America, Anne Finucane, and a trustee of the museum, Richard Chilton.

But Ms. Wang already had her favorites: “I love the Cassatts, and I love Sargent’s ‘Oyster-Gatherers,'” she said.

How did that board meeting go? “It is a privilege to be guiding such an important treasure house of art,” Ms. Wang said. “I really do feel there are few institutions as well run. I’m part of a well-oiled machine.”