Art of the Americas

Browse through our extensive selection of gifts inspired by works of art in our Art of the Americas collection.

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. Even as early as the 1870s the Museum received such gifts as Thomas Crawford's marble portrait of Charles Sumner and a Tiffany silver pitcher purchased at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. American silver continued to find its way into the Museum's collection through the first major exhibitions of such objects, held in 1906 and 1911. By the early 1900s, the Museum had acquired an important collection of paintings. In 1928 a series of American period rooms was installed with the addition of a decorative arts wing. The gift of the M. and M. Karolik Collection of Eighteenth-Century American Arts in 1939 established the MFA as a major repository of colonial and federal furniture, paintings, silver, and other objects 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 furniture, silver and masterpieces by Copley, Stuart, and Sargent, were given by descendents of the sitters or original owners. The collection ranks among the best of its type in the world, and is continuously enriched by acquisitions of paintings, furniture, sculpture, silver, glass, ceramics, pewter, and Native and ancient American arts from prehistoric times to the present.