SEPARATED BIRTH

education helping to foster an enlightened citizenry while stimulating improved work by tradesmen and enhancing industrial production with a concomitant economic benefit for the country at large.

Word of a movement to establish an art museum in New York may have reached Boston in the late 1860s, which, in competitive spirit decided to move forward quickly with their own plan. (It took nearly four years for New York to organize its museum after it was first proposed in 1866.) For Boston, the art museum was, in fact, an outgrowth of the activities and limitations of the Boston Athenaeum, which had been founded in 1807 as a private subscription library.the Athenaeum had included the acquisition of art objects early on.twenty years after its founding until shortly after the opening of the Boston Museum in 1876, development as well as cultural amenities. The plan for the creation of the museum moved forward rapidly after enabling legislation of February 4, 1870, created “a body corporate by the name of the Museum of Fine Arts for the purpose erecting a museum for the preservation of art, making, maintaining and establishing collections of such works, and of affording instruction in the Fine Arts.”with the creation of a board that included the initial 12 incorporators, representatives of the Athenaeum, Harvard and MIT, and public institutions and agencies including the Boston Public Library, the superintendent of the Boston Public Schools, the Board of Education, the Lowell Institute and the Mayor of Boston, the museum was launched.

Artists were noticeably absent from the board.it was,in effect,a closed corporation