One of the greatest art museums of the world, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston opened to the public in 1876.

The original MFA opened its doors to the public on July 4, 1876, the nation's centennial. Built in Copley Square, the MFA was then home to 5,600 works of art. Over the next several years, the collection and number of visitors grew exponentially, and in 1909 the Museum moved to its current home on Huntington Avenue.

Today the MFA is one of the most comprehensive art museums in the world; the collection encompasses nearly 450,000 works of art. We welcome more than one million visitors each year to experience art from ancient Egyptian to contemporary, special exhibitions, and innovative educational programs.

Among the finest in the Western world, the MFA's collection of Asian art covers the creative achievement of more than half the world's population since 4,000 BC. The collection encompasses Japanese, Chinese, and Indian painting and sculpture; Japanese prints and metalwork; Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese ceramics; the arts of the Islamic world; and a rapidly growing selection of Oceanic and African art.

Ranging in date from the seventh century to the late twentieth century, the collection of over 22,000 artworks includes masterpieces by some of the greatest artists in history. Paintings on canvas, panel, ivory, copper, and in fresco are matched by sculpture and works of decorative art, including furniture, metalwork, ceramics and glass, and architectural elements.

The MFA's collections of European decorative arts and sculpture are among the largest and most significant in the United States. Boston's unsurpassed collections of English silver and porcelain are complemented by historically significant collections of French decorative arts of the eighteenth century. The sculpture holdings feature masterworks from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as well as fine examples from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. In recent years, the collections of nineteenth-century and contemporary decorative arts have grown steadily.

The Art of the Ancient World collection ranks among the premier encyclopedic collections in the world, representing more than 7,000 years of art from Nubia, Egypt, the Near East, Cyprus, Anatolia, Greece, and Italy. The objects range in date from about 6500 BC to AD 600 and cover a geographical expanse from Afghanistan to Britain. In addition to architectural elements, sculpture, painting, vases, jewelry, and decorative arts, the department houses a numismatic collection of approximately 8,000 coins.

The MFA's collection also features many of the later twentieth century’s major figures and prominent artists of today—Chuck Close, David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, Susan Rothenberg, Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami, Anselm Kiefer, and Cindy Sherman.