CDR-1122: SR Set: American Painting in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, owns one of the nation’s preeminent collections of American paintings.  The very first object of any kind to enter the Museum's collection in 1870, the year of its founding, was American: Elijah in the Desert, by Washington Allston.  Since then the collection has grown to include some of the best-loved masterpieces of American art by John Singer Sargent, Gilbert Stuart, John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer and Mary Cassatt, to name a few.  By the early 1900s, the Museum had acquired an important collection of paintings. The gift of the M. and M. Karolik Collection of Eighteenth-Century American Arts in 1939 established the MFA as a major repository of paintings from urban centers. The second major gift of the Karoliks, in 1947, of American paintings created between 1815 and 1865, brought great strength in the Hudson River school, American genre painting, and American folk painting. Boston collectors have given generously to the Museum, and many of its finest works of art, including masterpieces by Copley, Stuart, and Sargent, were given by descendants of the sitters or original owners.

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