A collection that grew with the city
The MFA opened in 1870, built by a coalition of Harvard, MIT, and the City of Boston. It moved to its current Huntington Avenue building in 1909, and the collection has been growing ever since — now over 500,000 objects, making it one of the largest art museums in the Americas.
Unlike many encyclopaedic museums, the MFA has genuine depth in certain areas: its Impressionist holdings, its American collection, its Japanese art (one of the finest outside Japan), and its ancient Egyptian pieces are all exceptional rather than merely representative.
Monet: more than you expect
The MFA holds over thirty Monet paintings — the largest collection outside France. They include multiple Water Lilies studies, the Haystacks series, and several of his Rouen Cathedral canvases. The paintings are concentrated in the Art of Europe galleries, and seeing them in sequence does what the Musée d'Orsay also achieves: it lets you feel the logic of his obsession, the way he returned to the same subjects to measure how light changed them.
If you've only ever seen Monet in reproduction, the scale and texture of the actual paintings will surprise you.
The Sargent murals: look up
John Singer Sargent spent the last thirty years of his life working on murals for two Boston institutions: the Public Library and the MFA. The MFA rotunda and Wiggin Gallery contain the final series he completed before his death in 1925.
They're painted directly on the walls and ceiling and depict classical subjects — the Triumph of Religion, the Dogma of the Redemption — in a style that blends Renaissance fresco tradition with his own bravura handling of paint. Most visitors walk through without looking up. Look up.
Ancient Egypt: the underrated wing
The MFA's Egyptian collection was assembled largely through joint excavations with Harvard from 1905 to 1947, and it contains material not available in European collections. The decorated coffin of Djehutynakht and its mummy are here. So is a significant collection of Old Kingdom sculpture from Giza. The wing is on the lower level, consistently less crowded than comparable collections in New York or London, and the quality of the objects is extraordinary.
American art
The Art of the Americas wing opened in 2010 and reorganised the museum's American collection across twenty-six galleries. John Singleton Copley's colonial portraits are here — including Watson and the Shark (1778), a painting about a shark attack that is also somehow about the American spirit. Winslow Homer's seascapes. Sargent in depth. Georgia O'Keeffe. The collection runs from the colonial period to the early twentieth century with genuine seriousness.
Practical notes
Wednesday through Friday evenings the museum is open until 10pm and noticeably quieter than weekends. The MFA is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. The Bravo restaurant is a full-service option inside the museum; the café is more casual. Parking is available underneath for a fee; the Green Line (E branch, Museum stop) is easier.