The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston possesses one of the world's finest collections of 19th-century French and American art, with works by Degas, Manet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, and Sargent. This colorful book, the first published on the collection, illustrates many of its highlights.
Author Erica Hirshler outlines the history of the collection and considers the taste in Boston for atmospheric landscapes which, by the late 1880s, had led young Boston painters like Childe Hassam to Monet's door. Their willingness to embrace Impressionism helped to popularize this style of painting throughout the United States.
All the high points of Boston's 19th-century collections are revealed here, with works by the leading French Impressionist painters and their American counterparts.