This is one of five paintings featuring the MFA’s collection executed by Enrico Meneghelli, an Italian-born artist who worked in Boston and New York. Little is known about Meneghelli; even his death date remains uncertain. His known oeuvre includes a small number of landscapes, several street scenes, and at least one still life, but his specialty was the depiction of museum interiors. Paintings documenting collections, both real and imagined [1975.805], first became popular in Europe in the seventeenth century; among the earliest American examples are Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre (1831–33, Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago), which shows an imaginative display of works selected from the Louvre’s collection, and Amasa Hewins’s The Tribuna of the Uffizi [L-R 65.2010][JMS1] , a view of one of the most admired museum galleries of the day. Meneghelli’s pictures feature the actual installations of well-known art galleries, among them the Boston Athenaeum and the Louvre. The largest group shows spaces in the original Museum of Fine Arts building in Copley Square.
Founded in 1870, the Museum opened to the public on July 4,1876. [1]John Sturgis and Charles Brigham designed its Italian Gothic revival building, inspired by London’s then new and innovative South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum). Their original plans also encompassed two projected expansions: one completed in 1879 and one in 1890. While the first item to enter the MFA’s collection was Elijah in the Desert [70.1] by the American painter Washington Allston, the Museum collected and displayed a wide range of material, including Greek vases and Egyptian mummies, European decorative arts and paintings, Japanese arms, and plaster casts of the great sculpture of antiquity and the Renaissance. As was common practice, the galleries were crowded with objects and paintings were hung salon style, one over the other.

Gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts, Copley Square, undated by the artist, must have been executed after 1884, since the Henri Regnault painting Automedon with the Horses of Achilles [90.152], was not loaned to the Museum until that year. Regnault’s large square canvas can be seen through, and is framed by, the arched doorway leading into the Allston Room. Meneghelli’s viewpoint was a small antechamber on the second floor that looked into the First Picture Gallery. In this gallery, By the Riverside [84.248] by Henry Lerolle hangs at the right and Gustave Doré’s Summer [73.8] above. The Doré also appears in Meneghelli’s earlier painting, View of a Gallery in the Museum of Fine Arts, Copley Square[69.1124], showing the old Picture Gallery before the Museum’s expansion in 1879.

Notes
1. “About the MFA,” Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, http://www.mfa.org/about/ [http://www.mfa.org/about/]; for more on the MFA’s history, see Maureen Melton, An Invitation to Art: A History of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston [http://www.mfashop.com/780878467457.html] (Boston: MFA Publications, 2009).


Karen E. Quinn



[JMS1]The Hewins will be formally accessioned at the January 26 Board of Trustees meeting. An accession number will be assigned after that.

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