Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

I came here for the first time when I was on a trip with my high school music department. I fell in love with this museum from the moment I walked through its doors. I promised myself that day that I would make it back to this wonderful facility as often as I could. I kept that promised to myself and visited the museum at least once a month while I was living in Boston. Each time I went I toured a different section of the museum. My favorite collection was the Textile and Fashion Arts collection.

The museum boast a collection of over 450,000 pieces and it owns many rare and important artistic treasures from around the world. It's collections are broken down into the following categories:

Art of Asia, Oceania + Africa , Art of Europe, Art of the Americas, Art of the Ancient World,
Contemporary Art, Musical Instruments, Prints, Drawings + Photographs, and Textile and Fashion Arts

The museum also offers traveling exhibitions from around the world. A listing of current exhibitions can be found on the website.

The museum is open during the following days and times:
Monday and Tuesday
10 am-4:45 pm
Wednesday-Friday
10 am-9:45 pm
Saturday and Sunday
10 am-4:45 pm

An admission fee is charged in most cases. See the chart below for fees.
Members FREE
Adults $15
Seniors and Students 18 and older $13
Youths 7-17 $6.50
Youths 6 and under FREE

On Wednesdays there is no general admission is charged from 4-closing.

INCLUDED WITH GENERAL ADMISSION:
Full-day access to all open galleries (except ticketed exhibitions), One free repeat visit to the MFA's collections within ten days, FREE Guided Tours, FREE Gallery Talks and Admission to the Bookstore & Shop, Bravo restaurant, and Remis Auditorium

There is an additional charge for Gund Gallery ticketed exhibitions.

I hope that all visitors to the Boston area take the time to visit to wonderful museum. They will be glad that they did. I do not recommend the museum for very young children.

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts just introduced this and I tried to use it (Saturday, 20 Nov 2010) in the new Art of The Americas wing of the museum. It has a touch screen, supposed to work like an I-phone, but its design is non-intuitive. Where is the Help section? You will have to remember, from the 1-minute barrage of verbal instructions at time of rental, that it is 109 on the number pad. How do you get to the number pad? From selecting the language to use. How do you get to the language selection? Maybe from the Menu button. Where is that? The Menu button does not lead to a site map. As for the utility of the guide, it is scant relative to what is in any given gallery. Finding the little headset icon with a stop number – the signal that relevant information is available on the device – next to only a few works of art in room after room, I counted the number of works of art in three galleries, and the number of those that displayed the icon. The latter was 3% of the former. Moreover, access to that information is only available in the boundaries of a given ‘tour’ on the guide. If you unintentionally evoke the Stop Number screen through an inapt route, even though the work of art has the headset icon and a number, and you can tap in its number, a message will appear that this information “is not available on this tour.” When you do reach viable entries, the comments range from interpretive interesting (as for Fog Warning by Winslow Homer) to dull calling-attention-to (as for Drugstore by Edward Hopper). I voiced some of these criticisms to the museum volunteer when I returned the electronic guide, and she said (sympathetically) “They’re working on it.” Next to me, another museum visitor was expressing her own dissatisfaction with this device to another volunteer, who responded “They’re working on it.”
In contrast the new wing is attractive and the collections displayed in engaging ways. Enjoy them without this inadequate contraption

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The Boston Museum of Fine Arts was founded back in 1870. Over the years, its collection has grown to include over 400,000 works of art presented under the general themes of Art of the Americas, Art of Europe, Art of Asia, Oceania and Africa, Contemporary Art, and Art of the Ancient World. Even though I've visited quite a few fine arts museums over the past few years, I thought that one of the things that made the Boston MFA stand out was its extensive collection of Asian and African art, which I thought was really interesting. Also, even though the European masters section is not that big, it included several defining masterpieces, such as Renoir's "Dance at Bougival" and Gauguin's "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?". It is also home to John Singer Sargent's "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit", an 1882 portrait heavily influenced by Velazquez's "Las Meninas".

The Museum of Fine Arts is very easy to get around, it is big but not overwhelmingly so, there is a nice cafe and an equally nice (and more affordable) cafeteria. It is open everyday from 10:00 am to 4:45 pm, with late nights (9:45 pm) on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. General admission: $17 (free admission on Wednesday after 4:00 pm).

After living in New York City, we had this attitude that no small town (or smaller city) museum could ever compare to what we had seen there. That's true of course, but the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (or the MFA as the locals call it) is a fantastic museum experience...for different reasons.

The permanent collection is wonderful, with large ancient world and asia, oceania, and africa exhibits, and the temporary exhibits are always interesting. One of our favorite parts is the 'Please Be Seated' collection of benches throughout the museum. Great for taking a load off, especially the one in the Asian section that has foot massagers attached to the base!

The regular admission price of $17 (or more for special exhibits) may seem a bit high, but it is absolutely worth it!

Revere's Liberty Bowl; Gilbert Stuart’s (dollar bill) Washington; Duccio of Sienna Triptych of the Crucifixion....; Sargent's Daughters of Edward Darley Boit; Rembrandt the Artist in his studio; Paul Gauguin's Where Do We Come From?...; Joseph Turner’s Slave Ship; Burning of the Sanjo Palace; Bartlett Head of Aphrodite, possibly by Praxiteles; Head of Gudea from Sumer; Abraham Gessner’s Covered cup {with New Spain and New England}

Renowned collections, English Silver, Japanese Armor, Greek red figure pottery, Millet; Chinese funerary art

Egyptian Old Kingdom monumental columns with statue of King Mycerinus and queen, with Funerary Temple frescoed wall blocks; Mogul carved sandstone gate; Japanese temple with Buddhas; zen "dry" garden; the Chinese Vases from the Sarget, next to the painting and his murals above the main staircase; Federal period room with Copley's Revere. Liberty Bowl and Stuart’s Washington at Dorchester Heights; the Sienna Triptych near the Spanish Romanesque semicircular apse fresco of Christ in Majesty...

Temporary internal exhibitions: Donatello to Giambologna: Italian Renaissance Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, still viewable on the web

Guided walks and gallery talks, music, flower arrangements and live demonstrations including conservation of Thomas Sully's monumental, The Passage of the Delaware {equestrian George Washington}

Website: searches for 3000,000+ objects with pan and zoom; virtual collections with text, virtual tours including Roger’s 57 favorites {with sound}

These are uniquely Boston. However, The greatest feature of the MFA is that it is always changing: Foster and Partners Art of the America’s wing, revamped European painting galleries, and constantly dynamic programming

So plan your visit on mfa.org -- but be prepared to find something totally unexpected and wonderful -- They really do want Art to Be for Everyone

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Boston's Museum of Fine Arts is often considered to be one of the greatest collections of art in the world. For my money it is one of the richest and most varied you will ever visit. Not only does it have a high quality collection of Western painting but it also has so many magnificient pieces of works by Eastern and Ancient cultures that viewing the whole collection in one day is quite a titanic task that I do not recommend it. I have visited twice and I have still have yet to see all that this museum has to offer.
The MFA is particularly noted for it's magnificent Impressionistic collection, one of the finest outside of Paris. There are 43 works by Monet alone including many of this best pieces. There are also many famed works by Van Gogh, Renior and Degas. The collection of American works is also very strong. So many have been reproduced over the years that even those completely new to the art scene will recognize something. During my first visit I found the Japanese prints to be very interesting too. I cannot account for the large collections of decorative arts from the Renaissance and baroque periods as these were the galleries that I decided to bypass them during my first trip and during my second they were all stored away while the museum was being restored. The artifacts from ancient Greece and Rome are also very impressive and I wished I had allow myself more time to view them. As I said it talks more than one days visit to see everything.

The Museum of the National Center of Afro American Artists (NCAAA) exhibits black visual arts from around the world. The Museum presents a wide range of historical and contemporary exhibitions, including painting, sculpture, graphics, photography and decorative arts. The day I visited, there was an exhibit from South Africa. The facility is in a magnificent old building which has seen better days. The highlight is the huge bronze bust of a man's head which sits on the grounds. The facilkity can accomodate large groups and the curator was very knowledgeable and friendly.

We let my daughter pick another Boston activity and she picked the Museum of Fine Arts. Before you comment on how nice that is that we have a child with such a strong interest in the arts and culture, you should know that she had a school project (visiting a museum) that she needed to get out of the way. She completed her project while my husband and I wandered throughout the museum.

This is a fantastic museum in a very beautiful building. In addition, it has very easy access and is right next to a subway stop.