Born in Italy, trained in Paris and a resident of London, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) became Boston’s favorite painter in the 1880s. His commissions from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to decorate its new building’s grand staircase and rotunda resulted in one of Sargent’s last and most ambitious works. Sargent regarded the entire space as a giant canvas and brought together all the pictorial, decorative and architectural elements with a painter’s skill and vision. This compact volume offers a guide to the murals and their surroundings, elucidating their allegorical subjects drawn from classical mythology to emphasize the museum’s role as the guardian of fine arts.

Text by: Carol Troyen, Pamela Hatchfield, Lydia Vagts