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home > collections > art of the americas
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 |  | | A New Home for American Art
Our world-renowned collection of American art will be moving to a new American Wing, which opens in late 2010. As construction proceeds, the works of art are safely stored and in the process of being conserved, cleaned, and framed prior to installation. When the American Wing opens, there will be more than fifty new galleries devoted to the Art of the Americas, from the Pre-Columbian era through the third quarter of the twentieth century.
While these preparations are taking place behind the scenes, you can see Copley's portraits and his iconic painting Watson and the Shark, as well as Paul Revere's Liberty Bowl and other works of art from the period as part of "Colonial Highlights" in the Lee Gallery. View a slideshow of works on view in the Lee Gallery. In the Hilles Gallery, you will find nineteenth-century American Impressionist paintings and portraits by John Singer Sargent, including The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.
And don't miss a special installation that sheds light on John Singer Sargent's extraordinary and ambitious mural programs for the Museum's Sargent Rotunda. This display features preparatory drawings and oil sketches related to the artist's magnificent mural designs--one of the MFA's greatest treasures and a crowning achievement of Sargent's career.
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Highlights
NEW! Interactive tour of works by African American Artists
NEW! Interactive tour of American paintings highlights
NEW! Interactive tour of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture highlights |
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Overview of the Art of the Americas Collection
The very first object of any kind to enter the Museum's collection in 1870, the year of its founding, was American: Elijah in the Desert, by Washington Allston. Even as early as the 1870s the Museum received such gifts as Thomas Crawford's marble portrait of Charles Sumner and a Tiffany silver pitcher purchased at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. American silver continued to find its way into the Museum's collection through the first major exhibitions of such objects, held in 1906 and 1911. By the early 1900s, the Museum had acquired an important collection of paintings. In 1928 a series of American period rooms was installed with the addition of a decorative arts wing. The gift of the M. and M. Karolik Collection of Eighteenth-Century American Arts in 1939 established the MFA as a major repository of colonial and federal furniture, paintings, silver, and other objects from urban centers. The second major gift of the Karoliks, in 1947, of American paintings created between 1815 and 1865, brought great strength in the Hudson River school, American genre painting, and American folk painting.
Boston collectors have given generously to the Museum, and many of its finest works of art, including furniture, silver and masterpieces by Copley, Stuart, and Sargent, were given by descendents of the sitters or original owners. The 1990 gift of the William H. Lane Collection made American modernist painting another highlight of the collection. Trustee Landon T. Clay's gifts of works of art from the ancient Americas--in particular his gifts of gold works (in 1971 and 1975) and a donation in 1988 of a superb group of Maya polychrome ceramics--have created a collection of outstanding beauty and depth. The collection ranks among the best of its type in the world, and is continuously enriched by acquisions of paintings, furniture, sculpture, silver, glass, ceramics, pewter, and Native and ancient American arts from prehistoric times to the present. |
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The Karolik Society
Join the Karolik Society to support and learn more about the Art of the Americas department at the Museum. |
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