New Series MFA Highlights presents the best of the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in a new series of accessible, uniform paperback volumes. The aim of the series is threefold: to highlight the main holdings of the MFA's permanent collections in handsome, affordable editions; to provide an informed, readable overview of various segments of art, for use by students, visitors and scholars; and, over time, to create a library that will act as a general tour of world art. The first two titles in the series are American Painting and Arts of Egypt, to be followed by volumes on Musical Instruments, Photography, European Painting and Sculpture, European Decorative Arts, Contemporary Art, Textiles, Prints and Drawings, Modern Design, and the arts of China, Japan, Africa, India and the Islamic world. The look of these books is modern, but the content is timeless. Each book is approximately 250 pages, fully illustrated in color, bound in a uniform paperback format, and priced below $20.00. American Paintings features over 100 masterworks dating from 1670 to 1960 from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The aritsts featured range from Copley, Whistler, Cassatt, and Sargent to Hopper, Marin, Gorky and Pollock. Divided according to chronology and genre, each of the book's 15 sections begins with a thematic introduction, followed by short discussions of individual paintings. Certain introductions narrate a history of American painting--from the earliest years of the British colonies to the mid-twentieth century, touching on such focal points as the American Revolution, westward expansion, the Civil War, and the two World Wars--while others more specifically discuss genres such as history painting, folk painting, portraiture, and still life. The narrative touches on broader themes as well, such as the American artists' relationship with European art, the establishment of indigenous painting styles, the role of patronage in American art, and the question of provincial vs. “high” art. Rich in both visual and textual content, American Paintings is a valuable and enjoyable resource for both the museum visitor and the general reader.

American Paintings: MFA Highlights

Arts & Photography

Hirshler, Erica

History & Criticism

MFA Publications/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

A New World Imagined proposes a bold new look at the art of the Americas by viewing it through its intersections and relationships with the world at large. Taking the vast geography and staggering cultural diversity of the North and South American continents as its starting point, the book introduces the ways in which American art, broadly defined, has been shaped both by its encounters with cultures around the globe and by its own past--from the ancient and native populations that first inhabited these territories to the European, Asian, Scandinavian and Latino émigrés who settled here. But beyond actual immigration, foreign cultures--especially the strikingly different cultures of Asia and the Islamic world--have also impacted our own in purely imaginary ways, as American artists projected their fantasies and preconceptions on these far-off lands and "imported" their motifs, infusing their work with a rich, wholly invented and thoroughly American vision of the "other." Discussing over 200 artworks, from incense burners and painted drinking vessels to some of this country's most celebrated paintings and sculptures, and coinciding with the opening of MFA Boston's new Art of the Americas wing, A New World Imagined offers an alternate history of the Americas through the diverse inspirations and interactions through which its art has been fashioned.

A New World Imagined

Ward, Gerald W.R.

John Singer Sargent’s approach to watercolor was unconventional. Going beyond turn-of-the-century standards for carefully delineated and composed landscapes filled with transparent washes, his confidently bold, dense strokes and loosely defined forms startled critics and fellow practitioners alike. One reviewer of an exhibition in London proclaimed him “an eagle in a dove-cote”; another called his work “swagger” watercolors. For Sargent, however, the watercolors were not so much about swagger as about a renewed and liberated approach to painting. In watercolor, his vision became more personal and his works more interconnected, as he considered the way one image--often of a friend or favorite place--enhanced another. Sargent held only two major watercolor exhibitions in the United States during his lifetime. The contents of the first, in 1909, were purchased in their entirety by the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The paintings exhibited in the other, in 1912, were scooped up by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. John Singer Sargent Watercolors reunites nearly 100 works from these collections for the first time, arranging them by themes and subjects: sunlight on stone, figures reclining on grass, patterns of light and shadow. Enhanced by biographical and technical essays, and lavishly illustrated with 175 color reproductions, this publication introduces readers to the full sweep of Sargent’s accomplishments in this medium, in works that delight the eye as well as challenge our understanding of this prodigiously gifted artist. The international art star of the Gilded Age, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was born in Italy to American parents, trained in Paris and worked on both sides of the Atlantic. Sargent is best known for his dramatic and stylish portraits, but he was equally active as a landscapist, muralist, and watercolor painter. His dynamic and boldly conceived watercolors, created during travels to Tuscan gardens, Alpine retreats, Venetian canals and Bedouin encampments, record unusual motifs that caught his incisive eye.

John Singer Sargent: Watercolors

Carbone, Teresa

Individual Artists

MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Brooklyn Museum

The story of African Americans in the visual arts has closely paralleled their social, political and economic aspirations over the last 400 years. From enslaved craftspersons to contemporary painters, printmakers and sculptors, African American artists have created a wealth of artistic expression that addresses common experiences, such as exclusion from dominant cultural institutions, and confronts questions of identity and community. This generously illustrated volume gathers more than 100 works of art in a variety of media by leading figures from the nineteenth century to the present―among them, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Lois Mailou Jones, Gordon Parks, Wifredo Lam, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon and Kerry James Marshall―alongside many others who deserve to be better known, including artists from the African diaspora in South America and the Caribbean. Arranged thematically and featuring authoritative texts that provide historical and interpretive context, Common Wealth invites readers to share in a rich outpouring of art that meets shared challenges with individual creative responses.

Common Wealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Praised for his jewel-like landscapes, park scenes, and sympathetic images of women, William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) was a leading American Impressionist painter and an influential teacher in the late 19th century. This beautifully illustrated volume provides a compact introduction to Chase’s paintings and pastels and samples several of his favorite motifs, including the theatrical environment of his antique-filled studio, the modern women he celebrated, the costumes and decorative arts of Japan, children at play in city and countryside, and thoughtful moments of leisure and contemplation. A native of the state of Indiana, Chase left his modest boyhood home to study at the Munich Academy, where he both fell in love with the old masters and became determined to celebrate the people and places of his own time. His studio became a stage set for his imagination, where objects from around the world came together in harmonious arrangements of color and form, and where subjects and patrons alike were dazzled by both his paintings and his artistic persona.

William Merritt Chase

“Sargent makes you feel simultaneously drawn into and excluded from the sisters' world, a phenomenon that Erica E. Hirshler explores in intriguing detail in Sargent's Daughters.” –Megan Marshall, The New York Times Sunday Book Review Henry James credited John Singer Sargent with a "knock-down insolence of talent." Among the painter's many renowned works, few deserve the phrase as much as The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882), one of Sargent's greatest images. The painting of four young sisters in the family apartment both follows and defies convention, crossing the boundaries between portrait and genre scene, formal composition and casual snapshot. At its unveiling, one prominent critic praised Sargent's stunning originality, while another dismissed the canvas as "four corners and a void." Drawing on unpublished archival documents, curator and scholar Erica E. Hirshler explores this iconic painting's significance as an innovative work of art, the people involved in its making and what became of them, its importance to Sargent's career, its place in the tradition of artistic patronage and its changing meanings and lasting popularity. This evocative account, newly available in paperback, simultaneously illuminates a much-loved painting and reaffirms its mystery.

Sargent's Daughters: The Biography of a Painting

Themes of mortality and spirituality in the long-neglected art of a midcentury American pioneer “Bloom’s unsettling paintings are fueled by a sense of existence as a state of spiritual emergency and of art as a means for transfiguring fear.” –Holland Cotter, Art in America 
Hyman Bloom was a contemporary of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky. This new study focuses on Bloom’s paintings and drawings of human corpses, anatomical studies and archeological excavations from the 1940s and 1950s. He often returned to these subjects throughout his career, using thickly applied paint in rich colors as he aspired to present both the physical and the spiritual on canvas. Insightful curatorial essays accompanied by beautiful full-color reproductions explore this difficult but compelling work, considering themes such as the life, death and rebirth of Bloom’s artistic reputation; the growing divide between figuration and abstraction at this defining moment of American art; earlier artistic traditions of representing mortality; the relationship between these works and Bloom’s Judaism, interest in Eastern religions, and belief in reincarnation; and the artist’s desire to find beauty and meaning within death and decay. In these drawings and paintings, as Bloom himself asserted, “the paradox of the harrowing and the beautiful [can] be brought into unity.” Hyman Bloom (1913–2009) was born in Lithuania, now Latvia. He and his family immigrated to the United States in 1920, escaping anti-Semitic persecution. He lived and worked in the Boston area until his death. His work is held in many public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art and others.

Hyman Bloom: Matters of Life and Death

At the end of the nineteenth century, a remarkable group of artists, writers and patrons gathered regularly at the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, Italy. While Venice had long attracted wealthy tourists from across Europe and America, a particularly rich expatriate culture flourished at this time. In the 1880s, Daniel and Ariana Curtis of Boston purchased and restored the Palazzo Barbaro, where they lived in self-imposed exile. The Palazzo eventually became the center of a fascinating circle of American and English personalities living in Venice: the poet Robert Browning; Katharine de Kay Bronson of Newport, a writer greatly interested in local Venetian craft; Sir Austen Henry Layard, an archaelogist and an important collector of Renaissance paintings. Isabella and John Gardner, also of Boston, rented the Palazzo Barbaro every other year, beginning in 1884. A myriad of fascinating figures such as the painters John Singer Sargent, James McNeil Whistler and Claude Monet; the connoisseur Bernh

Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner And The Palazzo Barbaro Circle

Zorzi, Rosella Mamoli

McCauly, Anne

Isabella Stewart Gardiner

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.

Impressionism Abroad: Boston and French Painting

Royal Academy

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.

Impressionism Abroad: Boston And French Painting

Royal Academy Publications

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