Museum of Fine Arts (Boston)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Established	1870
Location	465 Huntington Avenue Boston, MA 02115
Coordinates	42°20′21″N 71°05′39″W / 42.339167°N 71.094167°W / 42.339167; -71.094167
Type	Art museum
Accreditation	AAM NARM
Visitors	1,227,163 (2015)
Director	Matthew Teitelbaum
Architect	Guy Lowell
Public transit access	Green Line (E Branch) Museum of Fine Arts   Orange Line Ruggles   Franklin Line Ruggles   Providence/Stoughton Line Ruggles
Website	mfa.org

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, is the fourth largest museum in the United States. It contains more than 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas. With more than one million visitors a year, it is the 55th most-visited art museum in the world as of 2014^[update].

Founded in 1870, the museum moved to its current location in 1909. The museum is affiliated with the Tufts School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

The Museum of Fine Arts was founded in 1870 and opened in 1876, with most of its initial collection taken from the Boston Athenæum Art Gallery. Francis Davis Millet, a local artist, was instrumental in starting the Art School affiliated with the museum, and in appointing Emil Otto Grundmann as its first director. The museum was originally located in a highly ornamented brick Gothic Revival building in Copley Square designed by John Hubbard Sturgis and Charles Brigham which was noted for its massed architectural terracotta in an American building. It was built almost entirely of red brick and terracotta with a small amount of stone in its base. The brick was produced by the Peerless Brick Company of Philadelphia and the terracotta was imported from England.

In 1907, plans were laid to build a new home for the museum on Huntington Avenue in Boston's Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood near the renowned Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Museum trustees decided to hire architect Guy Lowell to create a design for a museum so that could be built in stages as funding was obtained for each phase. Two years later, the first section of Lowell’s neoclassical design was completed. It featured a 500-foot (150 m) façade of granite and a grand rotunda. The museum moved to its new location later that year; the Copley Square Hotel eventually would replace the old building.