Unspecified/General

In the Fenway-Kenmore neighbourhood of Boston about three miles west of downtown, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston is one of the largest encyclopaedic art museums in the United States and one of the oldest. The museum opened its permanent home on the Fourth of July 1876, on the occasion of the celebrated United States Centennial Exhibition, in a small Gothic Revival building at Copley Square in central Boston. The museum relocated to its current dramatic Beaux-Arts building on Huntington Avenue in November 1909, occupying a substantially expanded campus that has been continuously enlarged over the subsequent century. The museum's current 615,000-square-foot multi-building complex includes the original 1909 Guy Lowell-designed main building (a dramatic neoclassical structure inspired by the great encyclopaedic art museums of Europe), the 1981 I. M. Pei-designed West Wing, the dramatic 2010 Foster + Partners-designed Art of the Americas Wing and the 2011 Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art (also by Foster + Partners). The 2010 Art of the Americas Wing added 53 new galleries spanning seven floors and is widely considered one of the finest extensions added to any American art museum during the early twenty-first century. The collection comprises nearly 500,000 individual works spanning nearly every major artistic tradition of the past 5,000 years. The Asian art collection (some 35,000 works) is one of the largest outside Asia, with particularly significant collections of Chinese ceramics, Japanese woodblock prints (more than 50,000 examples, the largest collection outside Japan) and Buddhist sculpture. The Egyptian collection (over 50,000 objects, the largest in the United States outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art) is the result of more than 50 years of joint expeditions undertaken between the museum and Harvard University from 1905 through the late 1940s. The European painting collection is particularly strong in the French Impressionists. The museum holds more than 40 individual works by Claude Monet (the largest collection outside Paris) including the celebrated 1875 La Japonaise. Works by Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Manet, Van Gogh and Gauguin round out one of the finest French Impressionist collections in any American art museum. The American painting collection is similarly distinguished, with major works by John Singleton Copley, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer and Mary Cassatt.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, United States

Telephone: 617-267-9300

Website: mfa.org

Opening Date: 04/07/1876