@firefly,
Lovely, lovely painting, ff. It's iconic for Bostonians who can actually remember (or think they can) the days when streetcars ran along Tremont Street before the first subway line was opened at the turn to the 20th century. Other than that, the Boston Common, on the right in the painting, still looks pretty much the same.
The Boston MFA is primarily noted for two things -- (1)It has one of the finest collections of Expressionist (and late Impressionist) paintings in the country, including an armload of Monets and some of the most famous Gauguins anywhere in the world (the ones you see reproduced in art books all the time); and (2) its Egyptology collection, which is the finest in America. There are only two other museums in the world that have as good, or better, Egyptian collections -- the British Museum and the Cairo museum (can't thinof its proper name now). The Met in NYC can't hold a candle to the Boston collection in terms of antiquite' the NYC stuff is all fairly new, by the standards of archeologists, that is.
The reason for the wealth of Egyptian mummies and stone sarcophagi and such is that all of the founders of the museum in the 1870s were Egyptologists, either by profession or avocation. They had all done archeological excavations in Egypt and brought back a wealth of stuff. (This was back in the days before international laws made such plundering of national treasures impossible). I'm not sure just how or why the museum acquired such a wealth of late 19th Century French art but it's all there.
