Your visit begins at one of the world's great comprehensive art museums. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was founded in 1870 and moved to its current neoclassical building in the Fenway in 1909. Its collection of approximately 500,000 works is encyclopedic in scope, with particular strength in ancient Egyptian art, Japanese art — one of the greatest Japanese collections outside Japan, assembled largely by Edward Morse and Ernest Fenollosa in the 1880s — American painting, and the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works that Boston collectors acquired in the late nineteenth century when Paris dealers were still uncertain about Monet and Renoir.
The American Wing contains the finest collection of American decorative arts in the country, documenting the material culture of New England from the colonial period through the early twentieth century. John Singer Sargent's murals in the rotunda, commissioned in 1916, are his largest secular work. The contemporary wing, designed by I.M. Pei and opened in 1981, and the American Wing, designed by Norman Foster and opened in 2010, have expanded the museum significantly.
Admission is required; the collection could occupy a week of serious looking.