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home > collections > art of the americas
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 |  | | Spend an afternoon with America's treasures
Come see Paul Revere's silver, fine new England furniture, and glorious paintings from all eras of America’s history by our greatest artists: John Singleton Copley, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, and many more.
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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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