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[ chapter three ] The FoundingVision for the Museum, 1870 On march 10, 1870, one month after the state legislature passed the act of incorporation for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the new institution’s founding trustees gathered “for the purpose of considering whether they [would] accept the Act of incorporation granted to them by the General Court.”¹ They eagerly accepted. So was born Boston’s first art museum, but at the beginning it possessed no building , no collection, and few financial resources. Immediately, practical questions pressed for answers: Where would the museum be? How would it be organized? How would it be funded? At the same time, the institution’s philosophical direction also demanded definition: What would be its purpose? Whom should it serve? What should it collect and exhibit? Only one of these questions found a quick answer when, in May 1870, the city gave the museum a grant of land for its future building. Others, however, required time for deliberation, and some—such as that of funds—remained unresolved for years. The original board of the MFA consisted of twenty-six men, appointed by three different methods.The first twelve were the incorporators. It was they who had applied in December 1869 to the state legislature to establish the museum; in February 1870 they were in turn named the museum’s incorporators. The nine men in the second group were institutional representatives: according to the terms of incorporation, each of the three institutions that had helped found the museum—the Athenæum, Harvard University, and MIT—was required to appoint three persons annually to the board. The last five men were ex officio appointments, all but one from the city government and its educational agencies: the mayor of Boston, the president of the Boston Public Library, the superintendent of the Boston public schools, the secretary of the city’s Board of Education, and the director of the Lowell Institute.² The customs of the day dictated that no women be considered for trusteeship, not even Mrs. Lawrence, who had contributed the single largest amount of money toward the museum’s establishment.³ [ 77 ] By design, the twelve incorporators were those who could give practical help to the young institution. In December 1869 they were chosen deliberately from a variety of fields: men of influence in the areas of finance, local politics, real estate, and manufacture were added to balance those “on the Fine Arts side.”⁴ The incorporators were a variegated bunch: although all prominent and civic-minded men of native stock, they ranged in age from thirty-three to seventy-three, and only seven of the twelve had gone to Harvard. Five were members, either by birth or marriage, of unquestionably well-established, illustrious Boston families (Martin Brimmer, Charles William Eliot, Samuel Eliot, Charles Callahan Perkins, and Benjamin Smith Rotch), who lent their names, wealth, and influence to innumerable cultural institutions and philanthropic enterprises.Three others hailed from outside Boston, all sons of professional fathers, and had achieved prominence through their intellectual and professional prowess (George Barrell Emerson, Francis Edward Parker, and William Barton Rogers). The remaining four were successful men of business who had turned their talents to the city’s political, cultural, and financial institutions (John Tisdale Bradlee, William Endicott Jr., Henry Purkitt Kidder, and Otis Norcross) (see Appendix). The remaining members of the board—the required institutional and ex officio appointments—were obviously expected to strengthen the museum’s connection to the city’s existing political, cultural, and educational structures.The young institution’s overwhelming need for practical assistance was probably the reason why the American Social Science Association, despite its significant contribution to the museum’s creation , had no formal representation on the board; the association, possessed of no funds, real estate, or collections, could offer little tangible help. The greatest strength of the founding board lay in the cohesion that already existed among many of its members. Not only did they share familial and business ties, but they also had worked with one another through their overlapping institutional affiliations. The specific histories, needs, and interests of the institutions that could help the MFA were common knowledge to the majority of these men, making communication smooth. As if to symbolize the group’s pedigree, the board held its meetings in the building of the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company, a trust and investment firm that handled a large proportion of the money belonging to wealthy Bostonians...

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