Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

1870

The museum began in 1870 on the top floor of the Boston Athenæum

The Museum of Fine Arts was founded in 1870. In 1876 it moved to a Gothic Revival building in Copley Square, built of brick and terracotta imported from England. That building was demolished after the museum moved out in 1909.

Fenway

The museum moved to Huntington Avenue in 1909

In 1907 the trustees hired architect Guy Lowell to design a museum that could be built in stages. The first section, a neoclassical design with a grand rotunda, was completed two years later.

500-footgranite facade of the first section

Sargent

John Singer Sargent painted the rotunda frescoes from 1916 to 1925

The frescoes adorn the rotunda and the associated colonnades. Sargent used a young Black model, Thomas McKeller, as his inspiration for Apollo and the other Greek gods depicted in the murals.

New wings

Later wings added a Pei building, a Japanese garden and the Americas

The West Wing, now the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art, was designed by I. M. Pei. The Tenshin-En Japanese Garden opened in 1988. The Art of the Americas Wing won the Harleston Parker Medal in 2014.

The scale

It owns more than 500,000 works of art, over 8,000 of them paintings

Measured by public gallery area, it is the 25th-largest art museum in the world. The collection is described as notably encyclopedic.

500,000works of art owned by the museum