Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Established	1870
Location	465 Huntington Avenue Boston, Massachusetts 02115
Visitors	Over 1 million visits annually
Director	Malcolm Rogers
Public transit access	Green Line (E Branch) Museum of Fine Arts   Orange Line Ruggles   Franklin/​Foxboro Line   Providence/​Stoughton Line
Website	www.mfa.org

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 (as of 2012) the 31st 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 Athenaeum Art Gallery. Francis Davis Millet was instrumental in starting the Art School attached to the museum and getting Emil Otto Grundmann (1844–1890) 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 (150 m) 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 (enlarged in 1968) 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 (12,400 m²) of space, enlarging the building by 28%.

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  Former museum building, Copley Square, Boston, 19th century
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  Former museum building, Copley Square, Boston, 19th century
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  Cyrus Dallin's statue Appeal to the Great Spirit stands outside the Museum's south entrance
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  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, seen from the Fenway, c. 1925

Art of the Americas Wing

The main entrance at night

The Art of the Americas Wing was 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.

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

Gilbert Stuart, Portrait of George Washington, 1796

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  John Singleton Copley, Paul Revere, 1768
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  John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778
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  Salem Harbor oil on canvas, painted by Fitz Henry Lane in 1853 and now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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  Fitz Hugh Lane, Owl's Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine, 1862
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  Frederic Church, Rainy Season in the Tropics, 1866
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  William Morris Hunt, Niagara Falls, c. 1878
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  John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit 1882
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  Winslow Homer, The Fog Warning, 1885

Highlights from the European collection

Peter Paul Rubens, Ahmed III al-Hafsi, Sultan of Tunis , 1613-1614

Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897

Claude Monet, Japanese Bridge and the Water-Lily Pond, 1900

European paintings and sculptures at the Museum of Fine Arts

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  William Blake, Satan Watching the Caresses of Adam and Eve' (Illustration to 'Paradise Lost'), 1808, pen; watercolor on paper
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  John Constable, The Stour-Valley with the Church of Dedham, 1814
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  J.M.W. Turner, The Slave Ship 1840, oil on canvas
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  Jean-François Millet, The Sower, 1850
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  Édouard Manet, Street Singer, 1862
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  Édouard Manet, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, 1867
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  Edgar Degas, Racehorses at Longchamp, 1873–1875
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  Madame Cézanne in a red armchair, 1877
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  Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Bougival, 1882–1883, (woman at left is painter Suzanne Valadon)
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  Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin (1841–1903), 1888
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  Claude Monet, The Fort of Antibes, 1888
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  La Berceuse (Augustine Roulin), 1889
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  Claude Monet, Haystacks, (sunset), 1890–1891
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  Paul Cézanne, Self-portrait, 1898-1900
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  Claude Monet, Branch of the Seine near Giverny, 1897
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  Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1905
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  Jean Metzinger, Fruit and a Jug on a Table, 1916-17

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

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  Egyptian room in former museum building, Copley Square, 19th century
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  The Museum is renowned for its collection of artifacts from ancient Egypt.
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  King Mycerinus (Menkaura) and his queen
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  "Nine Dragons" handscroll section, by Chen Rong, 1244 AD, Chinese Song Dynasty, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
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  Ladies making silk, early 12th-century painting by Emperor Huizong of Song (a remake of an 8th-century original by artist Zhang Xuan)
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  Medieval room in former museum building, Copley Square, 19th century

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 (1837–1900)—first Curator of Prints
• Fitzroy Carrington (1869–1954)—Curator of prints
• William George Constable (1887–1976)—Curator
• Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908)—Curator of Oriental Art (1890–1896)
• Okakura Kakuzō (1863–1913)—Curator of Oriental Art (1904–1913)
• Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947)—Curator of Oriental Art
• Jonathan Leo Fairbanks (1933–present)—Katharine Lane Weems Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture (1970–1999)
• Theodore Stebbins (1938–present)—John Moors Cabot Curator of American Paintings (1977–1999)

Governance

Finance

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.

See also

• School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts
• MFA Prints

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
• MFA Prints