Museum of Fine Arts

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, chartered and incorporated (1870) after a decision by the Boston Athenaeum, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to pool their collections of art objects and house them in adequate public galleries. The first building was opened in 1876; the present one, designed by Guy Lowell, in 1909. The museum is supported entirely by private contributions and endowments. Its collection of art from India is thought to be the finest in the United States. The museum's collections of Chinese and Japanese art are outstanding. The Egyptian wing, housing the Way Collection, includes Old Kingdom sculpture unrivaled except in Cairo. The painting galleries are notable for many examples of Spanish art and are particularly strong in works by American artists; 18th-century portraitists, especially Copley and Stuart, are magnificently represented. The museum owns many canvases by John Singer Sargent as well as his mural decorations in the rotunda. The silver work of Paul Revere is shown in quantities unequaled elsewhere. There is also a rich collection of graphic art.

---

Museum of Fine Arts 

(Országos Szépmiivészeti Múzeum), in Budapest, the largest collection of foreign works of fine art in Hungary. Founded in 1896. The museum building was constructed in the neoclassical style during the period 1900–06 by the architects A. Schickedanz and F. Herzog.

The museum’s collection, which is composed mainly of major private collections, including that of Esterházy, contains monuments of ancient Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Byzantine, and Old Hungarian art (up to the end of the 18th century), a unique collection of European graphic art from the 15th through the 20th centuries (including drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, A. Dürer, Rembrandt, J. van Ruysdael, and A. Watteau), and paintings and sculpture by European masters from the 13th through the 20th centuries (including canvases by El Greco, D. Velázquez, F. Goya, L. Cranach, Gentile Bellini, and Giorgione and medieval sculpture). The museum publishes a bulletin (Szépmüvészeti Müzeum közleményei; published twice a year since 1947 in Hungarian and French).

REFERENCES

Putevoditel’ po Muzeiu iziashchnykh iskusstv. Budapest, 1965.
Pigler, A. A Reégi képtár katalogusa (Országos Szépmüvészeti Múzeum), vols. 1–2. Budapest, 1954.
Katalog der Galerie alter Meister (Museum der bildenden Künste), vols. 1–2. Budapest, 1967.