Among the most compelling of Nicholas Nixon’s series of photographs are the portraits that he has made of his close-knit family. These photographs, taken over time, explore the nature of long-committed relationships. The exhibition features the entire sequence of the celebrated portraits of...
The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), has graciously lent The Sower, painted in the town of Arles in southern France in November of 1888. It is shown in the Sidney and Esther Rabb Gallery with a work that van Gogh had known through reproductions since at least the early...
The Shahnama, often called the "national epic" of Iran, was completed around the year 1010 by the Persian poet Abu'l Qasim Firdawsi. A vast and complex poem, it opens with the creation of the world and concludes with the Muslim conquest of Iran in the mid-seventh century, thus...
For the "Signs and Symbols" project, children from after-school programs and community organizations across Boston looked at how words and characters are paired together to convey messages. Working with Cambridge-based artist and author Caleb Neelon, the children then created signs...
This year’s “SMFA Traveling Scholars” exhibition features works by five Museum School alumni who each received the prestigious Traveling Scholarship Award in 2008. The artists traveled locally and internationally and produced a new body of work on view in the exhibition. Fresh and...
Tattooing became an important feature of Japanese urban popular culture in the early 19th century, influenced strongly by the success of a series of woodblock prints featuring Chinese martial arts heroes with spectacular tattoos, vividly imagined by the artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Tattoo artists...
Luis Meléndez (1716–1780) was the greatest still life painter of 18th-century Spain. An accomplished painter of miniatures, he began creating still lifes as early as 1759. In 1771 he was awarded a commission from the Prince of Asturias (later Charles IV), an avid amateur of the new...
By juxtaposing pieces from Africa and Oceania selected from private collections with photographs, “Object, Image, Collector” explores the complex intertwining of the histories of these objects, photography, and collecting. Objects from the African continent and the Pacific came to...
Albrecht Dürer was the pivotal figure of Late Gothic and High Renaissance German art. He remains, after 500 years—like Rembrandt, Goya, and Picasso—one of the supreme masters of printmaking. His engravings and woodcuts are a dazzling combination of observation, imagination, and...
The French aristocrat Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), one of the most innovative artists of the late nineteenth century, is known for his bold and subtle images of performers in the centers of Parisian entertainment in the 1880s and 1890s: the café-concerts and cabaret nightclubs in...
Harry Callahan was one of the most innovative photographers working in America in the mid-twentieth century. Images of his wife, Eleanor; passers-by on the street; cityscapes; landscapes; close-ups from nature; multiple exposures; and darkroom abstractions reveal the elegantly spare formalism and...
Shinto is not an organized religion or even a unified system of beliefs. Instead, the Japanese use the word to describe a whole group of religious ideas and practices focused on the forces of nature and ancestors, both mythological and real. Originally, Shinto did not use images. The various...
“Bharat Ratna,” which translates literally to the “Jewel of India,” presents a selection of outstanding works by some of India’s most celebrated modern painters. Drawn from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Rajiv Jahangir Chaudhri, the exhibition focuses on a generation...
Nagoya and Boston Exchange Artwork This exhibition marks the sixth annual exchange between young people in Nagoya, Japan, and Boston. This unique project links young audiences and celebrates the international partnership between the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts,...
In a 1915 excavation, archaeologists from the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition discovered the entrance to a tomb at the picturesque site of Deir el-Bersha in Egypt. Inside, the MFA team found, in jumbled array, the largest burial assemblage of the Middle Kingdom (2040-1640...
More than 400 years ago, Japan forged strong trading partnerships with China and the West, and Japan’s lacquer and porcelains were among the most sought-after luxuries in the world. Although Japan largely closed itself to the West around 1640 to preserve domestic stability, Chinese and Dutch...