The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, is one of the largest museums in the United
States. It contains more than 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive
collections in the Americas. With more than one million visitors a year, it is the 62nd
most-visited art museum in the world. Founded in 1870, the museum moved to its current
location in 1909. The museum is affiliated with an art academy, the School of the Museum
of Fine Arts, and a sister museum, the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in Nagoya, Japan. The
director of the museum is Malcolm Rogers.
History 1870–1907
The museum was founded in 1870 and opened in 1876, with most of its collection taken
from the Boston Athenæum Art Gallery. Francis Davis Millet was instrumental in starting
the Art School attached to the museum and getting Emil Otto Grundmann appointed as its
first director. The museum was originally located in a highly ornamented brick Gothic
Revival building designed by John Hubbard Sturgis and Charles Brigham and noted for
its unusual amount of architectural terra cotta for a U.S. building. It sat on Copley
Square in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston. 1907–2000s
In 1907, plans were laid to build a new home for the museum on Huntington Avenue, Boston's
"Avenue of the Arts". Museum trustees hired architect Guy Lowell to create a master plan
for a museum that could be built in stages as funding was obtained for each phase. In
1909, the first section of Lowell’s neoclassical design was completed; it featured a 500-foot
façade of cut granite along Huntington Avenue, the grand rotunda, and the associated exhibition
galleries. The museum moved in later that year.
The second phase of construction, funded entirely by Mrs. Robert Dawson Evans, built a wing
along the Back Bay Fens to house painting galleries. It opened in 1915. From 1916 through
1925, John Singer Sargent created the art that lines the rotunda and the associated
colonnade. Numerous additions enlarged the building throughout the years, including the
Decorative Arts Wing in 1928 and the Norma Jean Calderwood Garden Court and Terrace in
1997. The West Wing, designed by I. M. Pei, opened in 1981, and was renamed the Linde
Family Wing for Contemporary Art in 2008. This wing now houses the museum's cafe, restaurant,
and gift shop as well as exhibition space. The libraries at the Museum of Fine Arts house
320,000 items. The William Morris Hunt Memorial Library is named for the Vermont native and
Boston painter and arts teacher. The museum holds many works by Hunt, including the 1866
Italian Peasant Boy. 2000s expansion
In the mid-2000s, the museum launched a major effort to renovate and expand its facilities.
The work included a new Art of the Americas Wing that shows art from North, South, and
Central America; redesigned and expanded education facilities; and extensive renovations of its
European and Classical galleries, visitor services, and conservation facilities. Ultimately,
the project added 133,500 square feet of space, enlarging the building by 28%.
Art of the Americas Wing The Art of the Americas Wing and adjoining
Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard were designed in a restrained, contemporary
style by the London architectural firm of Foster and Partners, under the directorship
of Thomas T. Difraia. CBT/Childs Bertman Tseckares Architects of Boston was the project's Architect
of Record. In 2006, groundbreaking ceremonies took place
for the Art of the Americas Wing, which features art from North, South, and Central America.
As part of the project, the adjacent garden courtyard was transformed into a climate-controlled
year-round glass atrium enclosure, including restaurant seating. Landscape architects Gustafson
Guthrie Nichol redesigned the Huntington Avenue and Fenway entrances, gardens, access roads,
and interior courtyards. The wing opened November 20, 2010, with free
admission to the public. Mayor Thomas Menino declared it "Museum of Fine Arts Day," and
more than 13,500 attended the festive opening. The day kicked off in the wing's enclosed
glass-walled court with an ASL-interpreted speech by Malcolm Rogers. He spoke from the
second-floor landing of the cantilevered glass staircase that connects the wing's three levels
of galleries. “Our goal through this project is to make the MFA more accessible," said
Rogers. “This is your museum." Many of the wing's 53 galleries are dedicated
to individual artists or artistic movements, including pre-Columbian arts, Maya ceramics,
Native North American art, African-American artists, the colonial portraiture of John
Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart, the silverware of Paul Revere, the Hudson River School of
landscape painting, folk art, photography, and works by John Singer Sargent. Sargent's
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit is symmetrically flanked by the pair of tall ceramic vases
which are depicted in the painting. The wing's glass-walled outer hallways display
several sculptures from the Museum's collection, including the once controversial original
Bacchante and Infant Faun which had been sculpted by Frederick William MacMonnies for the garden
court of the Boston Public Library. Several galleries are devoted to art by Western
Hemisphere artists of the 20th century. Industrial designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, Eva
Zeisel, Eliot Noyes, and Russel Wright are represented in a gallery devoted to products
designed for mass production. The 12,000-square-foot glass-enclosed Ruth
and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard features Dale Chihuly's 42.5 feet high glass sculpture,
Lime Green Icicle Tower, the New American Café, and access to the Gund Gallery exhibit
space. Collection and exhibits
Some highlights of the MFA's collection include: Egyptian artifacts including sculptures, sarcophagi,
and jewelry. French impressionist and post-impressionist
works including Paul Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?,
as well as works by Manet, Renoir, Degas, Monet, Van Gogh, Cézanne and many others.
The Young Shepherdess by Jean-François Millet, underneath which an earlier painting previously
presumed lost, The Captivity of the Jews in Babylon, was revealed by x-rays in 1984.
18th- and 19th-century American art, including many works by John Singleton Copley, Winslow
Homer and John Singer Sargent. Extensive collection of Chinese painting,
calligraphy and imperial Chinese art, including some of the most treasured paintings in Chinese
history. The largest museum collection of Japanese
works under one roof in the world outside of Japan, including the Edward S. Morse collection
of 5,000 pieces of Japanese pottery. The Gund Gallery which hosts temporary exhibits
while a Japanese garden is constructed outside the museum itself.
Highlights from the American collection
Highlights from the European collection
More collection highlights Art of Asia, Oceania, and Africa
Art of Europe Art of the Americas
Art of the Ancient World Contemporary Art
Musical instruments Prints, Drawings, and Photographs
Textile and Fashion Arts
The museum also maintains one of the largest on-line art catalogs in the world, with information
about over 346,000 items from its collection available on-line, many with an accompanying
photograph. As a result of the ongoing expansion of the
museum, a number of standing exhibits are still in storage.
Notable curators Sylvester Rosa Koehler—first Curator of
Prints Fitzroy Carrington—Curator of prints
William George Constable—Curator of Painting Ernest Fenollosa—Curator of Oriental Art
Okakura Kakuzō—Curator of Oriental Art Ananda Coomaraswamy—Curator of Oriental
Art Jonathan Leo Fairbanks—Katharine Lane Weems
Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture Theodore Stebbins—John Moors Cabot Curator
of American Paintings Governance
Finances In a seven-year fundraising campaign between
2001 and 2008—for a new wing, the endowment, and operating expenses—the museum managed
to pull in $504 million plus $165 million worth of art. When rates on so-called auction
rate securities—which large museums including the Museum of Fine Arts have tapped—skyrocketed
during the credit crunch, the museum exited the auction rate market in 2008. By 2009,
$1.5m were trimmed from the budget, and the museum increased revenues from travelling
exhibitions, which include shows it sent to the for-profit Bellagio Gallery in Las Vegas
and a ten-year-old partnership with a branch museum in Nagoya, Japan. In 2011, Moody's
affirmed the museum's Aa2 rating on its $185 million in outstanding debt. The agency cited
growing attendance, a large endowment, and positive cash flow as reasons to believe the
museum's bonds would remain a stable bet. Acquisitions and deaccessioning
The Museum of Fine Arts has an acquisitions endowment, which totals $141 million and provides
about $6.6 million a year. In 2011, the museum put eight paintings by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro,
Sisley, Gauguin and others on sale at Sotheby's, bringing in a total of $21.6 million, to pay
for Man at His Bath by Gustave Caillebotte at a cost reported to be more than $15 million.
Sustainability The Museum of Fine Arts led the movement to
widen ranges for acceptable temperature and humidity levels, reducing energy consumption
and costs but still providing maximum protection, and pioneered the use of reusable shipping
crates with adjustable interiors to accommodate paintings or objects of varying sizes.
See also School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts References
External links Museum of Fine Arts—The official web site
Works from MFA Boston were stored at the Williams College Museum of Art during World War II