Guide to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston

Boston, Massachusetts is home to a pair of the most prestigious art museums in America, and the two could not be more different. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a former private home where the founder and namesake set out to share her collection in an intimate setting exactly as she envisioned it, unchanged today after more than a century. Her neighbor in the Fenway section of Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, is a large and ever-evolving collection displayed on a grand scale.

In fact, the Museum of Fine Arts is one of the largest in the country, with a collection of nearly half a million works of art and over a million visitors each year. In 2010, the museum will expand even further, with a new wing designed to highlight art of the Americas - including the Museum of Fine Arts already-heralded collection of colonial era works.

A century ago, the Museum of Fine Arts moved into its current home along the Fens in Boston, a grand neoclassical building featuring a 500-foot long façade with colonnade and a central rotunda. Famed artist John Singer Sargent was commissioned to create a series of murals over and around the grand staircase at the center of the museum. The murals were unveiled six months after Sargent died in 1925 as he was about to set sail from London to Boston to oversee their installation. His famous portrait of "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" is among his paintings that are part of the MFA's collection.

Sargent is one of a number of artists with Boston roots whose work is in the vast collection of the Museum of Fine Arts. Portraits by John Singleton Copley abound, including those of Revolutionary War patriots such as John Adams, John Hancock, Samuels Adams and Paul Revere. The museum also holds items Revere crafted in his work as a silversmith, part of a large collection of silver acquired in the museum's early years.

Perhaps the most famous painting hanging at the Museum of Fine Arts is by Gilbert Stuart, who died and is buried in Boston. His unfinished portrait of George Washington, known as "The Athenaeum," is reproduced on the front of every U.S. dollar bill.

The Museum of Fine Arts also offers American art without a direct connection to Boston, including realist Thomas Eakins and many fine examples from Thomas Cole and the Hudson River school.

But the Museum of Fine Arts is about more than its Boston home - or even the breadth of American art in its collection. The MFA has wide holdings in European art as well, with popular works by Impressionist and post-Impressionists - Renoir, Van Gogh, Gauguin and more. The collection of paintings my Claude Monet is said to be the largest outside of Paris. Among the most well-known works in the museum's European collection are Renoir's "Dance at Bougival" and Gauguin's "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?"

The Museum of Fine Arts is located at 465 Huntington Avenue in the Fenway section of Boston. It is open daily, Guided tours and gallery talks are included with the price of admission.