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EPILOGUE I n total, the Boston Athenæum deposited more than twelve hundred items at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.¹ This sizable loan clearly expressed the Athenæum’s desire to help the young museum; this desire also prompted the Athenæum to offer its gallery, funds, and eager support to the other institution, especially during the latter’s first six years. What were the sources of this closeness? Self-preservation, on both sides, was certainly one. The museum, which began with no collection, no building, and modest funds, needed to depend on the kindness of others. On the part of the Athenæum, the Fine Arts Committee, its fate within its own institution becoming more and more tenuous in the late 1860s, wished to preserve at least a portion of its function in the proposed museum. Moreover, the Athenæum and the museum were siblings, sharing parentage and values, in the family of cultural and educational organizations that Boston’s elite founded and funded with increasing zeal in the nineteenth century. Among the many institutions that made up this family, the Athenæum and the museum were particularly close because of their shared interest in art. In reality, however, the museum’s founding purpose incorporated a number of cultural prescriptions of midcentury origin about the role of art in society. The transatlantic impulse to link art and industry was one of these imperatives; the democratizing urge to make art available to a wider audience was another.These, and others, of the museum’s aspirations were in fact quite different from the Athenæum’s overall purpose, which had its roots in earlier times. But because the Fine Arts Committee, having effectively been severed from the main body of the Athenæum, had by the late 1860s lost much of its vision and vigor, it eagerly embraced even the newer ideas that defined the founding vision of the MFA. As it happened, this institutional relationship was reinforced further by the personal closeness between the brothers Edward Newton Perkins of the Athenæum and [ 159 ] Charles Callahan Perkins of the museum. Finally, as post–Civil War America sought to strengthen its support for art, the growing competition among American cities to establish institutions of art—or, more precisely, institutions of art education —united the two Boston entities all the more strongly in their joint endeavor. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the collaboration had run its course. When, after 1900, the focus of the Museum of Fine Arts shifted from the didacticism of its early years to the acquisition and display of the original and the rare, many crucial parts of its earlier history were selectively ignored, as was the Athenæum’s close former association with it. Much of the Athenæum’s contribution to the MFA had been intangible and was therefore the more easily forgotten. As for the Athenæum’s tangible offerings—loans—to the museum, they might have been remembered better and longer if they had taken the form of the kinds of objects that are today deemed worthy of the great institution that the Museum of Fine Arts has become. Instead of such objects—say, a rare ancient Greek vase, a painting by Jean-François Millet, or a screen from the Edo period in Japan—the Athenæum purchased mostly plaster casts and decorative arts, which the younger institution had desired in its early years but which sat, after 1900, increasingly outside its new collecting focus. A small number of the Athenæum’s deposits at the museum began to return as early as the late 1880s, but the majority stayed at the museum into the twentieth century. As the MFA changed and taste shifted in the new century, many of the physical signs of the Athenæum’s once ardent desire to help the young institution came to feel increasingly like an inconvenient inheritance. As the twentieth century wore on, some of the Athenæum’s objects remained on view, and a few categories of objects even rose in their value to the museum, such as nineteenth-century American works.The rest of the Athenæum’s deposits, however, became irrelevant to the museum for one reason or another and disappeared, one by one. Much of the oak paneling of the Lawrence Room, for example, was pronounced to be “modern” or fake soon after the museum moved to its new building in 1909. The room...

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