Museum of Fine Arts Boston

The Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MFA) is one of the largest and most encyclopedic art museums in the United States, holding a permanent collection of more than 500,000 works spanning approximately 5,000 years of artistic production from around the world. The museum occupies a Beaux-Arts building on Huntington Avenue in Boston's Fenway neighborhood, extended in 1981 by an I.M. Pei-designed West Wing and expanded again in 2010 with the Art of the Americas Wing. The Egyptian collection ranks among the finest outside Cairo, assembled in part through the museum's own excavations in the early twentieth century and displayed across multiple interconnected galleries with mummies, sarcophagi, and ritual objects presented in cultural context. The European paintings galleries feature works by Rembrandt, El Greco, Velázquez, and a distinguished group of French Impressionists including Monet, Renoir, and Degas. The American Wing traces painting and decorative arts from colonial silversmithing through nineteenth-century landscape painting and into modernism, with John Singer Sargent's monumental rotunda murals constituting one of the most ambitious decorative programs undertaken by any American artist. The Japanese art holdings form one of the largest and most significant collections of Japanese art outside Japan. A focused visit to two or three wings takes two to three hours; a thorough exploration of the full permanent collection requires a full day or multiple visits. The museum's Wednesday through Friday extended hours until 10pm offer a less crowded alternative to weekend daytime visits. Photography for personal use is permitted in most permanent galleries. The on-site Bravo restaurant and cafeteria-style New American Café serve meals and light fare throughout visiting hours.