Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: A Renowned Collection of Nearly 500,000 Works

Last month, I found myself in the city of Boston for the first time as I was contracted to photograph a three-day trip to Beantown by a delegation of senior business and community leaders from the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance. The Alliance’s bi-annual ‘Leadership Trip’ brings community leaders in business, non-profit, entertainment, education, technology and the arts, face-to-face with those very same community leaders in other cities to network and discuss best practices.
 
Two years ago, I traveled with the Alliance to San Diego. I arrived a day early and spent the day visiting the city’s Balboa Park during the day and Chicano Park during the late afternoon. This year, I also arrived a day early and being the art museum nerd I am, paid a visit the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – the 20th-largest art museum in the world.
 

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was founded in 1870 in Copley Square, the museum moved to its current Fenway location in 1909. Museum trustees hired American architect Guy Lowell to create a design for a museum that could be built in stages, as funding was obtained for each phase.
 
The Evans Wing for Paintings opened in 1915, followed by The Decorative Arts Wing in 1928 (both designed by Guy Lowell) which houses the Museum’s extensive collection of European and American decorative arts.
 

 
The MFA continued its expansion with the George Robert White Wing, designed by Hugh Stubbins (best known for the angular tower of the Citicorp Center in Manhattan), opening in June 1970, and the West Wing, designed by Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei (best known for the glass pyramid he designed for the Louvre in Paris in 1989), opening in 1981, incorporating a large gallery space for special exhibitions, an auditorium, restaurants, and shops.
 
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 receive over $500 million, in addition to acquiring over $160 million worth of art.
 


 
From 1916 through 1925, artist John Singer Sargent, the leading portraitist of his era, painted the frescoes that adorn the rotunda and the associated colonnades. The commissions from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to decorate its new building’s most important public spaces -the grand staircase and rotunda – resulted in one of Sargent’s last and most ambitious works.
 

 
MFA Boston contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas. With more than 1.2 million visitors a year, it is the 79th-most-visited art museum in the world as of 2022.
 
Featuring permanent exhibitions covering Africa, Ancient Egypt, Greece & Rome, Contemporary Art, Europe, Photography, and Musical Instruments (to name a few), MFA Boston is huge. I spent over four hours there with my Xiaomi 13 Ultra camera phone and could have easily spent another few hours there. It is well worth the visit. This coming from a guy born and raised in NYC.
 
Enjoy the photographs…
 


“St. Joan in Waiting” (2024) by American artist Maria Cazzato
 

“Power” (2023) by Korean-American artist Ian Choi
 

“Sea Serpent I & II” (2024) by American artist Bertil Chappuis Muñoz
 





[Top Left] “Perry T. Rathbone” (1948) by German artist Max Beckmann (1884-1950). Rathbone, who was one of Beckmann’s early supporters, went on to direct the MFA from 1955–72; he later gave the painting to the Museum. [Top Right] A painting of Rathbone’s wife Euretta, also by Beckmann. [Top Center] “Carmelina” (1903) by French artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was considered a shocking example of contemporary French painting when it was acquired by MFA in 1931.
 

“Bocca Baciata (Lips That Have Been Kissed)” (1859) by English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)
 


“Portrait of a Young Married Couple” (1621-22) by Flemish artist Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678)
 



“Twelfth-Night Feast” (1662) by Dutch artist Jan Steen (1626–1679)
 



“The Triumph of the Winter Queen: Allegory of the Just” (1636) by Dutch Golden Age painter Gerrit van Honthorst (1592-1656)
 



“Woman Tuning a Lute” (circa 1700-1705) by Italian (Bolognese) artist Giuseppe Maria Crespi (1665–1747)
 



“Flower Beds at Vétheuil” (1881) by French artist Claude Monet (1840–1926)
 

A couple discussing the merits of French artist Paul Gauguin’s monumental “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (1897–98). Gaugin explored fundamental questions concerning the nature and meaning of life after experiencing a psychological crisis in the winter of 1897.
 


“The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer” (1878-81) by French sculptor Edgar Degas (1834-1917). If you feel you might have seen this very same sculpture at an art museum near you, you just might have. There are actually 28 bronze casts of this sculpture, made after Degas’s death, which are found in museums and galleries around the world. The original sculpture, a wax model, is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
 

The woman shown wrapped in a splendid kimono and surrounded by fans in in Claude Monet’s “La Japonaise” (1876) is Monet’s wife, Camille, wearing a blond wig to emphasize her Western identity.
 

A group of students seated in front of “Lighthouse Walk at Biarritz” (1906) by Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923)
 

“Helen Sears” by the “leading portrait painter of his generation”, American artist John Singer Sargent
 

“L’Ange du Destin (The Angel of Destiny)” (1899) by French arist Odilon Redon (1840–1916)
 

Any art museum worth its salt should not be devoid of a painting illustrating a beheading and MFA Boston proves itself competent with “Judith with the Head of Holofernes” (1543) by Flemish painter Jan Massys (1509–1575). Judith helped save her fellow Israelites from the forces of Assyrian king Nebuchadnezzar by seducing general Holofernes, getting him drunk, then beheading him.
 




“Still Life in an Architectural Setting” (1645) by Flemish artists Jan Fyt, who painted the animals, and Erasmus Quellinus the Younger, who painted the figures
 

“Woman in an Interior” (1909) by Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916)
 



Frans Francken the Younger’s “Allegory of Man’s Choice” (about 1635) depicts a scene with three realms: heaven, earth, and hell, illustrating the choices humanity faces.
 








[TOP L-R] “Marion Hiller Fenno at Nine as Mandolinata” (1887–88) by American painter Edmund C. Tarbell (1862–1938), “Caritas” (1894-95) by Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849–1921), who was one of the best-known artists in the United States during the 1890s, and “My Sister Lydia” (1888) also by Edmund Tarbell
 





“Lady with a Red Shawl” (circa 1840), artist unknown
 



American artist Henry Darby was only seventeen years old when he created “The Reverend John Atwood and His Family” in their New Boston, New Hampshire home. Darby, from Adams, Massachusetts, boarded with the Atwoods in the summer of 1845 and may have painted this picture in exchange for food and lodging. He is not known to have had any artistic training, which makes the achievement of this life-sized painting (72 1/8 x 96 1/4 in.) all the more remarkable.
 

Scholars have differed over whether this image, “The Bone Player” (1856) by American artist William Sidney Mount (1807–1868), painted just five years before the Civil War when tensions over slavery were high, was a typical nineteenth-century stereotyped depiction of an African American or a sensitive portrait of an individual. Mount walked a fine line between stereotyping and individualism, between genre painting and portraiture.
 

“Mrs. Fiske Warren (Gretchen Osgood) and Her Daughter Rachel” (1903) by John Singer Sargent (1856–1925). Gretchen Osgood Warren, posing with her eldest daughter, was a member of a prominent Boston family and an accomplished poet.
 




Budding artists, surely hoping to have their own works hanging inside an art museum one day, could be found throughout the halls of the MFA
 





Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, John Wilson (1922–2015) is one of Boston’s most esteemed artists. His work, made over the span of 60 years, continues to resonate with the persistent realities of disenfranchisement, racial prejudice, and social injustice.
 

“Black Soldier” (1943)
 

“Black Despair” (1945)
 

 

“Campesinos” (1952)
 

“Becky” (1966)
 



While at the John Wilson exhibit, I noticed cameras and several people crowded around an Asian woman holding a small child. That woman just so happened to be Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, the first woman and first person of color to be elected to the position, as well as the youngest Boston Mayor in nearly a century. She was there with her three kids and very accessible. I would meet her the following Tuesday at one of the Alliance’s events at the Historic Copley Square Boston Public Library. She was very warm and friendly to everyone she came into contact with.
 


Exit through the gift shop…
 

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is open every day except Tuesday from 10am-5pm with tickets for adults starting at $27. With barely enough time to see the museum’s many exhibitions, I passed on Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits, which features 23 portraits by Van Gogh of the neighboring Roulin family during his stay in Arles, in the South of France. The exhibit runs through September 7, 2025 and adds $7 to the general admission price.All photographs taken with the Xiaomi 13 Ultra