Impressive Asian Art at the Museum of Fine Arts

THE BOSTON GLOBE
By Sebastian Smee

Losang Gyatso, the Fifth Dalai Laman, about 1670-1680

MASSACHUSETTS---One of the great stories in the history of the arts in Boston — right up there with the writings of the Transcendentalists or the surging ambition of the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky — is the story of the formation of the Asian collection at the Museum of Fine Arts. It’s great because it involved extraordinary people, because it sent out ripples of influence in every direction, and because it left behind such an impressive material legacy. The people were, first and foremost, Edward Morse, Ernest Fenollosa, and William Sturgis Bigelow. Today, the MFA is famous around the world for its Asian holdings. It has a collection of Japanese art unsurpassed anywhere outside Japan. [link]