With Éclat: The Boston Athenæum and the Origin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Introduction

INTRODUCTION The new building of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), was expected to open in the city’s Back Bay in the summer of 1876, six years after the incorporation of the institution. Less than a year before, in the autumn of 1875, the trustees of the Boston Athenæum searched for ways to inaugurate the museum, as they put it, “with éclat.”¹ A membership library founded in 1807, the Athenæum was by then known for its fine collections of books and art, its elegant edifice on Beacon Street, and its illustrious members. In October 1875 the Athenæum trustees voted, in anticipation of the MFA’s opening, to spend eight thousand dollars of the institution’s funds on the purchase of decorative arts objects from Italy—in bronze, wood, and textiles— and lend them indefinitely to the museum.² As it happened, this act of munificence was but one of many that the Athenæum offered the fledgling museum, beginning even before the museum’s establishment in 1870 and continuing into the late 1880s. This desire on the part of the Athenæum to ensure success for the new museum and the collaboration that resulted from that desire are the subject of this book. Although once vitally connected, today the Athenæum and the MFA are two distinctly separate institutions, each with its own character and well-defined collecting areas. One of the largest membership libraries in America, the Athenæum houses, in its landmark 1849 building at 10½ Beacon Street, more than 600,000 rare and circulating books as well as important collections of paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings, maps, and manuscripts, and it continues to acquire in all these areas. The Athenæum’s activities are supported by a belief that knowledge and refinement come not only from books but from many other forms of culture. Accordingly, all the collections are available for enjoyment and study to the Athenæum’s approximately seven thousand members in addition to researchers from across the nation and abroad. The Athenæum also offers a wide array of cultural programs, including art exhibitions , lectures, discussion groups, and concerts. The MFA, by contrast, is one of the finest art museums in the world, renowned for its encyclopedic collections of nearly [ 11 ] [ 12 ] introduction 450,000 works of art from virtually all civilizations and many centuries. Since its move in 1909 to its current location on Huntington Avenue, the museum has steadily enlarged its collections and enriched its galleries. Today, it attracts more than one million visitors annually who encounter, when entering its grand edifice, original works of art as well as a vibrant selection of educational and cultural programs. Over the years, the Athenæum has made occasional if oblique references to its past relationship with the museum. The statement that the Athenæum’s “galleries of art formed the nucleus of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts” appears on one of the two brass tablets prominently displayed inside the building’s entrance, but specific details of the connection have remained little known.³ Even rarer are the museum’s references to its past involvement with the Athenæum, and they are buried in the provenance of the paintings and sculptures that the museum purchased from the Athenæum in the 1970s, a full century after the Athenæum had deposited them there. Outside the two institutions, the few books that have cited the erstwhile alliance have done so, for the most part, inadequately.⁴ Not surprisingly, few people—even in Boston— know that the Athenæum and the museum ever had a relation, let alone engaged in an intimate collaboration. Something has happened to fade the memory of the ardent desire that once drew the two parties inexorably close. This book attempts to retrieve that portion of the past and to find reasons for the loss of memory. In the history of nineteenth-century American cultural institutions, the case of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is typical. Like many other American art museums founded around the same time—New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, also in 1870, and the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1879, for example—the museum in Boston was established by prominent local citizens who wished to correct, with education, the city’s perceived indifference to art. As the thin aesthetic soil of the United States became a national concern after the Civil War, the growing...