Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Elijah in the Desert, Washington Allston
Storm Rising at Sea, Washington Allston
Meditation at the seashore, American painter around 1850
The Procuress, Dirck van Baburen
Charles Sumner Bird and His Sister Edith Bird Bass, Cecilia Beaux
Italian Hill Town (perhaps Nemi ?), Jean-Achille Benouville
Valley of the Yosemite, Albert Bierstadt
Archangel Raphael with Adam and Eve, William Blake
Fraternal Love (Virgin and Child with Young Saint John), William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Portrait of two Boys (said to be the Autichamp Brothers), Joseph Boze
The Pool, Medfield, Dennis Miller Bunker
Jessica, Dennis Miller Bunker
Meadow Lands, Dennis Miller Bunker
George Augustus Gardner, Dennis Miller Bunker
Turn in the road, Paul Cézanne
The Stour-Valley with the Church of Dedham, John Constable
Ascension, John Singleton Copley
Mrs. Joseph Barrell (Hannah Fitch), John Singleton Copley
The Conventional One, Thomas Couture
Sibyl, Donato Creti
Racehorses at Longchamp, Edgar Germain Hilaire Degas
Saint Mary Magdalene Penitent, Domenico Fetti
Entrance to the village, Paul Gauguin
Women and white horse, Paul Gauguin
St Dominic in Prayer, El Greco
The Slate, John Haberle
Approaching Storm: Beach near Newport, Martin Johnson Heade
Fog warning, Winslow Homer
Portrait of Dr. Franz Xavier von Soist, Franz Ittenbach
Portrait of a Young Married Couple, Jacob Jordaens
Young Boy Selling Vegetables, Bernhard Keil
Vase of Flowers, John LaFarge
A Hillside Study (Two Trees), John LaFarge
Owl's Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine, Fitz Henry Lane
Portrait of a Lady, Maurice Quentin de La Tour
New York Street Scene, . Ernest Lawson
By the Riverside . Henry Lerolle
The Sower, Jean-François Millet
Potato Planters, Jean-François Millet
Boy and Girl Blowing Soap Bubbles, Matthijs Naiveu
François de Gontaut, Duc de Biron, Nicolas de Largillière
Cliffs, Green River, Wyoming, Thomas Moran
Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome, Giovanni Paolo Pannini
Portrait of a Man Playing a Lute, Bartolomeo Passarotti
Rest on Flight to Egypt, Cornelis van Poelenburgh
Les canotiers, Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Dance in Bougival, Pierre-Auguste Renoir
The Boit Daughters, John Singer Sargent
First Snow in Louveciennes, Alfred Sisley
Still life , grapes and nuts, Alfred Sisley
In Memoriam, Alfred Stevens
Portrait of George Washington, Gilbert Stuart
Mother and Child in a Boat, Edmund Charles Tarbell
Portrait of the poet Luis de Góngora y Argote, Diego Velázquez
Meadows and Low Hills, Antoine Vollon
The view, Antoine Watteau
The Little Rose of Lyme Regis, James Abbot McNeill Whistler
The Last of old Westminster, James Abbot McNeill Whistler
Palaces Brussels, James Abbot McNeill Whistler
Enclosed Field with Ploughman , Vincent van Gogh
The Museum of Fine Arts (or MFA) 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 55th most-visited art museum in the world as of 2014.
Founded in 1870, the museum moved to its current location in 1909. The museum is affiliated with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and its sister museum, the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in Nagoya, Japan.
In 2014, The Art of the Americas Wing was recognized for its high architectural achievement by being awarded the Harleston Parker Medal, by the Boston Society of Architects.
History
1870–1907
A view of the original Museum of Fine Arts building in Copley Square.
The
Museum of Fine Arts was founded in 1870 and opened in 1876 with most of
its collection taken from the Boston Athenæum Art Gallery. Francis
Davis Millet, a local artist, was instrumental in starting the Art
School affiliated with the museum, and in appointing Emil Otto
Grundmann as its first director.[1] The museum was originally located
in a highly ornamented brick Gothic Revival building in Copley Square
designed by John Hubbard Sturgis and Charles Brigham and noted for its
mass amount of architectural terracotta for an American building. It
was built almost entirely of red brick and terracotta with a small
amount of stone in its base. The brick was produced by the Peerless
Brick Company of Philadelphia and the terracotta was imported from
England.[2]
1907–2008
In 1907, plans were laid to build a new home for the museum on Huntington Avenue in Boston's Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood near the renowned Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Museum trustees decided to hire architect Guy Lowell to create a design for a museum so that could be built in stages as funding was obtained for each phase. Two years later, the first section of Lowell’s neoclassical design was completed. It featured a 500-foot (150 m) façade of granite and a grand rotunda. The museum moved in to the site later that year.
The second phase of construction built a wing along the The Fens to house paintings galleries. It was funded entirely by Maria Antoinette Evans Hunt, the wife of a wealthy business magnate Robert Dawson Evans, and opened in 1915. From 1916 through 1925, the noted artist John Singer Sargent painted the frescoes that adorn the rotunda and the associated colonnades. Numerous additions enlarged the building throughout the years, including the Decorative Arts wing in 1928 (again 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 a special exhibition space.[3]
The libraries at
the Museum of Fine Arts house 320,000 items. Its main branch, the
William Morris Hunt Memorial Library, named after the noted American
artist, is located off-site in Horticultural Hall.[4]
2008-present
Cyrus Dallin's Appeal to the Great Spirit stands outside the museum's south entrance.
In the mid-2000s, the museum launched a major effort to renovate and expand its facilities. In a seven-year fundraising campaign between 2001 and 2008 for a new wing, the endowment, and operating expenses, the museum managed to total over $500 million, in addition to acquiring over $160 million worth of art.[5] During the global financial crisis between 2007 and 2012, the museum's budget was trimmed by $1.5 million and the museum increased revenues by conducting traveling exhibitions, which included a loan exhibition sent to the for-profit Bellagio in Las Vegas in exchange for $1 million. In 2011, Moody's Investors Service calculated the museum's had over $180 million in outstanding debt. However, the agency cited growing attendance, a large endowment, and positive cash flow as reasons to believe that the museum's would become stable in the near future.
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.[6]
The renovation
included a new Art of the Americas Wing to feature artwork from North,
South, and Central America. In 2006, the groundbreaking ceremonies took
place. The wing and adjoining Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard
were designed in a restrained, contemporary style by the London-based
architectural firm Foster and Partners, under the directorship of
Thomas T. Difraia and CBT/Childs Bertman Tseckares Architects. The
landscape architecture firm Gustafson Guthrie Nichol redesigned the
Huntington Avenue and Fenway entrances, gardens, access roads, and
interior courtyards.
People enjoying the museum's Japanese garden, Tenshin-en.
The wing opened on November 20, 2010 with free admission to the public. Mayor Thomas Menino declared it "Museum of Fine Arts Day," and more than 13,500 visitors attended the opening. The 12,000-square-foot glass-enclosed courtyard features a 42.5 feet (13.0 m) high glass sculpture, titled the Lime Green Icicle Tower, by Dale Chihuly.[7]
In
2015, the museum renovated its Japanese garden, Tenshin-en. The garden,
which originally opened in 1988, was designed by Japanese Professor
Kinsaku Nakane. The garden's kabukimon-style entrance gate was built by
Chris Hall of Massachusetts, using traditional Japanese carpentry.[8]
[9]
Collection
A gallery of European art in the museum.
The Museum of Fine Arts holds one of the most comprehensive collections in the world, and possesses materials from a wide variety of schools and cultures. The museum maintains one of the largest online databases in the world with information on over 346,000 items from its collection with digital images.
Some highlights of the collection include:
Egyptian artifacts including sculptures, sarcophagi, and jewelry.
French impressionist and post-impressionist works by artists such as
Paul Gauguin, Manet, Renoir, Degas, Monet, Van Gogh, Cézanne.
18th- and 19th-century American art, including many works by John
Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and Gilbert
Stuart.
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 Rothschild Collection - over 130 objects from the Austrian branch
of the Rothschild family. Donated by Bettina Burr and other heirs.[10]
Highlights
Note that other notable works are in the collection but the following examples are ones in the public domain and for which pictures are available.
Notable people
Directors
Emil Otto Grundmann - first Director
Edward Robinson - second Director
Arthur Fairbanks - third Director
Malcolm Rogers - tenth Director
Matthew Teitelbaum - eleventh Director
Curators
Sylvester Rosa Koehler - first Curator of Prints (1887-1900)
Ernest Fenollosa - Curator of Oriental Art (1890–1896)
Okakura Kakuzō - Curator of Oriental Art (1904–1913)
Fitzroy Carrington - Curator of Prints (1912-1921)
Ananda Coomaraswamy - Curator of Oriental Art (1917–1933)
William George Constable - Curator of Paintings (1938-1957)
Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III - Curator of Classical Art (1957-1996)
Jonathan Leo Fairbanks - Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture (1970–1999)
Theodore Stebbins - Curator of American Paintings (1977–1999)
Anne Poulet - Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts (1979–1999)
See also
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts
References
Natasha. "John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery". Jssgallery.org. Retrieved 2012-12-17.
"An announcement was made..." (hathitrust.org). The Brickbuilder
(Boston, MA: Rodgers & Manson) 8 (12): 237. December 1899.
Retrieved 7 March 2015.
"Architectural History - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston". Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Retrieved March 4, 2012.
"The William Morris Hunt Memorial Library, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston". Mfa.org. Retrieved 2012-12-17.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/giving/11BOSTON.html
Judith H. Dobrzynski (March 14, 2012), "How an Acquisition Fund Burnishes Reputations". The New York Times.
"Lime Green Icicle Tower". Museum of Fine Arts. Retrieved October 26, 2014.
"Japanese Garden, Tenshin-en". Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Retrieved 16 August 2015.
Takes, Joanna Werch (January 20, 2015). "Chris Hall: A
(Japanese-Inspired) Timber Framing Philosophy for Furniture".
Woodworker's Journal. Retrieved 16 August 2015.
"Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Announces Major Gift from Rothschild
Heirs, Including Family Treasures Recovered from Austria after WWII."
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 22 February 2015. Retrieved 3 March 2015.
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