The MFA’s Free Memorial Day Community Weekend marks the debut of three paintings lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Northeaster (1895) by Winslow Homer; Lachrymae (Tears, about 1894–95; completed by 1901) by Frederic, Lord Leighton; and The Monet Family in Their Garden at...
Visit “To Boston With Love,” an installation of more than 1700 hand-sewn flags strung across the Shapiro Family Courtyard. The flags were created by quilters from nearly every state in the US and from countries around the world. The flags convey inspirational messages of hope,...
“Michelangelo: Sacred and Profane, Master Drawings from the Casa Buonarroti” features a rich and varied selection of 26 works from the master’s collection, preserved in the artist's family home, the Casa Buonarroti, in Florence. The exhibition includes many of...
Travel back in time and discover remarkable objects that illuminate the life, culture, and pageantry of these revered and feared Japanese warriors—from one of the best and largest collections in the world. “Samurai! Armor from the Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Collection”...
"Blue and white" means, at its simplest, cobalt pigment applied to white clay. Over the course of a millennium, blue-and-white porcelain has become one of the most recognized types of ceramic production worldwide. With roots in the Islamic world and Asia, and strong presence in Europe and...
Watch the story of the Triumph of the Winter Queen unfold in an immersive media experience, as Gerrit van Honthorst’s painting is brought to life. The tale is dramatized through passages from the royal couple’s letters, maps, music—and even falling snow. On view in the Loring...
An extraordinary loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art gives you the opportunity to see two of the great masterpieces of French painting in America hanging side by side: Paul Cézanne’s The Large Bathers and the MFA’s own Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going...
This exhibition celebrates the MFA’s recent acquisition of the 43 prints by renowned New York photographer Bruce Davidson that were originally showcased in his groundbreaking show, “East 100th Street,” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. These powerful images capture the...
Don’t miss your chance to see one of the icons of Roman art on view in the MFA’s Roman Art Gallery only through May 1. The Capitoline “Brutus,” a world-famous bronze portrait of a Roman statesman is on loan from the Palazzo dei Conservatori/Capitoline Museum, Rome, for...
The international poster mania of the 1890s made fine art accessible to the masses, bringing it out of the salon into the streets and shop windows. Great posters proliferated, however, long after this “golden age,” as revealed by the standout images in “Art in the Street”...
Chinese lacquer, derived from the sap or resin of trees native to China, has been made for more than 2,000 years. Technically challenging and time-consuming to create, lacquer was considered a luxury material, on par with gold and silver, and was created for the Imperial court and wealthy elite,...
The official philosophy of Korea’s Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910) was Confucianism. Buddhism was suppressed during this period, but in practice, many, including the royal family, continued to believe in Buddhism and to support temples financially. Many temples moved out of the towns to...
In the decades around 1900, postcards were Twitter, e-mail, Flickr, and Facebook, all wrapped into one. A postcard craze swept the world, as billions of cards were bought and mailed, or just pasted into albums. Many famous artists turned to the new medium, but one of the great pleasures of...
“Kings, Queens, and Courtiers: Royalty on Paper” features examples of the various ways in which European rulers and their aristocratic followers have been represented on paper from the sixteenth century to 1900. In several instances (as with Emperor Maximilian I of Austria, Henri II...
Get an inside look at some of today’s most elusive and exclusive subjects through the lens of renowned celebrity photographer and Vogue and Vanity Fair contributor Mario Testino. Testino's first US exhibition represents the brilliant range and quality of his thirty-year career and...
Shortly after photographer Mario Testino went to England from his native Peru in 1976, he took his first photograph of British royalty, an impromptu shot of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and her grandson, Prince Edward, as they passed by crowds gathered in London’s streets to...
Remembered by SMFA faculty and staff as a particularly disciplined student, New York painter Daniel Rich has spent a decade investigating the link between architecture, nationalism, and political power. Rich works from Google images, newspapers, and his own photographs. His labor-intensive and...
This exhibition features a range of works from participants in the MFA's Artful Healing program, which brings the MFA collection and Museum educators to three partner institutions—Massachusetts General Hospital, Children’s Hospital Boston, and Dana Farber Cancer Institute—to...
Ori Gersht is a conduit between the past and the present. With the latest digital technology, Gersht’s work poetically revisits sources ranging from 19th-century romantic landscape painting to the Holocaust, which imbue his work with a compelling tension between beauty and violence, memory...
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Urban commoners in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan, known as the Floating World, enjoyed a hedonistic lifestyle that included the pleasure of the companionship of pet animals. Many woodblock prints of fashionable beauties show them accompanied by elegant, pampered pets that symbolize...
To celebrate the centennial of Fenway Park, the Museum of Fine Arts and Boston Red Sox have partnered on an online photography contest. Fans of baseball and photography submitted their favorite Fenway photos from the past 100 years to three virtual galleries—Portrait, Landscape, and “...
Beginning in the first decades of the nineteenth century, artists and writers were drawn to the pristine beauty of north New Hampshire's natural wonders: majestic peaks in the Franconia and Presidential ranges crowned by Mount Washington, the highest summit in the northeast; Crawford, Pinkham...
This year marks Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, celebrating 60 years as monarch of Great Britain and the Commonwealth realms. Yousuf Karsh photographed Her Majesty five times between 1943 and 1987, including the three powerful portraits on view—capturing her first as...
Venice in the eighteenth century, the age of Casanova, was one of the pleasure centers of Europe, famed for its theater and opera and its carnival maskers. Even today, the city, when compared with ordinary cities, appears to be a fantasy, a dream, a hallucination. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s...
Let the dancing begin! The MFA welcomes two monumental loans from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris—Renoir's Dance in the City and Dance in the Country—as part of our Visiting Masterpieces series. These full-length canvases accompany the MFA's own iconic Renoir, Dance at...
Enter the world of glowing light and vibrant color of “Alex Katz Prints.” Bold portraits, idyllic landscapes, scenes of sophisticated leisure—they’re all here in the works of the renowned contemporary artist. With arresting simplicity of line, color, and form, Katz...
Under the guidance of artist Hannah Burr, students from eight after-school community organizations in the Boston area responded to works from the MFA’s encyclopedic collection. Through the students’ drawings, audio recordings, and transcriptions, “Fresh Eyes” demonstrates...
In 1941, the Limited Editions Club of New York invited photographer Edward Weston to illustrate its deluxe edition of Walt Whitman’s epic poem Leaves of Grass. The commission inspired Weston and his wife, Charis, to take a cross-country trip, throughout the South, the Mid-Atlantic states, New...
A fascination for all things Japanese swept the United States in the period around 1900. An influx of Japanese goods and emissaries into America sparked a wave of interest in a foreign culture once seen as impossibly remote. Artists and collectors gathered Japanese objects, studied Japanese...
We are delighted to welcome back to the Dutch and Flemish galleries masterpieces from the collection of Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, including Rembrandt’s sublime Portrait of Aeltje van Uylenburgh (1632) and Dou’s sympathetic little Sleeping Dog (1650). These favorites and dozens...
Shambhala is a Sanskrit word describing a mythical land whose exact location is hidden behind mist of snow-capped mountains, where peace reigns, wealth abounds, and there is no illness. The West was first introduced to the concept as “Shangri-la” in the 1930s book and film Lost...
Images of fashion exploded in the 20th century with the proliferation of ready-to-wear and glossy fashion magazines. As photography gradually became the medium of choice for fashion advertising, artists who worked by hand began to emphasize interpretation and impression over pure likeness. They...