In Search of the Masters of Boston.

I made a pilgrimage to Beantown, in search of awe inspiring oil paintings - I wasn’t disappointed.

A statue of painter John Singleton Copley by Lewis Cohen stands just outside our hotel, the Fairmont Copley Plaza in Boston’s Copley Square.

During the first weekend in January, I tagged along on Mira’s business trip to Boston. I’d never been to the Massachusetts capital, and decided it was a perfect opportunity to discover world-class museums and experience first hand, some of the finest oil paintings in the world.

Boston is a city with a rich history, and that’s no exception when it comes to painters. It’s where during the American Revolution, John Singleton Copley became well-established as a portrait painter of the wealthy in colonial New England. It’s also the place John Singer Sargent called his “American Home” when he moved to Boston as an expatriate in the late 1880’s. Both Copley and Sargent are painters I admire, and I was excited to have the opportunity to see some of their greatest works.

On the morning we arrived, I walked through a fine mist of rain, from the Fairmont Copley Plaza (a historic grand hotel in Copley Square, where Sargent stayed), to the largest art institution in the city, The Museum of Fine Arts - MFA Boston. I later realized the significance of my starting point, as the Sturgis and Brigham-designed building in the center of Copley Square was, from 1876-1909 the original location of MFA Boston. Despite the weather conditions, it was a pleasant journey weaving through the city streets, imagining life as a Berklee College of Music student, walking through campus, until I reached my destination - a massive neo-classical building in the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood.

MFA Boston has one of the most comprehensive art collections in the world with over 450,000 works, including about 8,100 paintings. There are multiple wings with 4 levels surrounding the modern, indoor glass and concrete Shapiro Family Courtyard and New American Cafe. I started in the Art of the Americas galleries on level 1, and worked my way up. It wasn’t difficult to spend almost 5 hours wandering through this massive museum. Despite my extended stay, I still managed to miss a few key paintings that I left for next time … a good reason to come back.

Below are 10 oil paintings that stood out for me during my visit to MFA Boston:

John Singer Sargent - Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882)

MFA Boston holds an entire gallery devoted to John Singer Sargent, with some of his most recognizable and reknowned paintings on display, it’s touted as the world’s most complete collection of works by the artist, including this one, Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882), which is curated beside the same Japanese vases that are shown in the moody and enigmatic painting.

John Singer Sargent - Mrs. Fiske Warren and Her Daughter Rachel (1903)

Sargent’s special charm is in the way he delights the eye with so many marvelous textures, shimmering light, and unusual colour harmonies, while giving the appearance of having wasted no time on superfluous details. In this double portrait he has solved the problem of two subjects in a masterly way by posing them as he did here, in a pyramidal composition. The Golden Mean from the left edge runs through the daughter’s face and hand. Sargent sometimes worked sight-size from life in his portraits.

J. M. W. Turner - Slave Ship (1840)

When The Slave Ship was first displayed at Royal Academy of Arts in 1840, it attracted the attention of critics who were dismayed by the horrific subject matter and abstracted style. For instance, one famous review by William Makepeace Thackeray poses the rhetorical question, "Is the painting sublime or ridiculous? Indeed I don't know which." Others harped on Turner's use of color and fixation on nature's devastation

Thomas Sully - The Passage Of The Delaware (1819)

John Singleton Copley - Paul Revere (1768)

El Greco - Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino (1609)

Rembrandt - Portrait Of A 62 Year Old Woman (1632)

Van Gogh - Postman Joseph Roulin (1888)

Claude Monet - Morning on the Seine, near Giverny (1897)

Sir Anthony Van Dyck - Portrait of a Gentleman, thought to be Abbe Cesare Alessandro Scaglia (c.1627)

This portrait by Van Deck is striking in its realism and style. Conservation by Philip Mould Ltd has established that the over-paint had been added to incorporate an additional strip of canvas of about 6 inches at the top of the picture. It is not known when this addition was applied. However, the lining is thought to be at least a century old. It is possible that the strip was added to allow the picture to fit into a more standard size English 18th Century frame sometime in the 19th Century.

Ostra - 1 Charles St. S, Boston, MA 02116

After the museum, we met up for a lobster dinner at Ostra, a Michelin-rated restaurant that our Uber driver called “one of those Bougie places.” I really liked it!

A view of the Courtyard of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

The following day, I visited the landmark Isabella Gardiner Museum. A truly unique and eclectic museum collection, housed in a building that evokes a 15th-century Venetian palace.

I spent many hours moving from room to room taking in this unprecedented collection. The Gardiner includes works by some of Europe's most important artists, such as Botticelli, Titian, Diego Velázquez and Rembrandt.

I was particularly interested in seeing Sargent’s large El Jaleo piece, depicting a Spanish Romani dancer. Apparently, the Spanish Cloister gallery of the museum was constructed by Isabella Stewart Gardner specifically for this painting.

In March 1990, a theft occurred at the museum, when 2 men dressed as police officers broke in and stole 13 pieces of art, including Vermeer’s The Concert, Rembrandt’s only seascape - Christ In The Storm On The Sea Of Galilee and another titled A Lady and Gentleman In Black, as well as Edouard Manet’s Chez Tortoni and 5 works on paper by Edgar Degas. It was shocking to see the empty frames still hanging on the wall where they once hung, as a symbol of hope that they might be returned one day. The museum is offering a $10 Million reward for information that leads to the recovery of the stolen artworks, but more than 3 decades after the most expensive art heist in US history, the crime is still unsolved. There is an excellent docu-series on Netflix called This Is A Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist that dives into the details and provides insights on the investigation, including possible suspects.

John Singer Sargent - El Jaleo (1882)

In 1888 the painting was publicly exhibited in Boston, at which time museum patron Isabella Stewart Gardner, expressed her interest in it. In 1914 she borrowed El Jaleo to exhibit in her museum, and constructed the Spanish Cloister gallery especially for El Jaleo, which is framed by a Moorish arch and reflected the painting in a large mirror running perpendicular to its left edge. The painting was inspired by a five-month trip Sargent made through Spain and North Africa in 1879.

John Singer Sargent - Watercolours

A view of the north wall in the Blue Room where a number of important Sargent watercolor works are hung, including Incensing The Veil (1880), Santa Maria Della Salute, Venice (1903-1907) and Miss Violet Sargent (1890)

Portrait of John Singer Sargent (1922)

Drawing after Alexander James (American, 1890-1946)

The Raphael Room

In 1898, Isabella Stewart Gardner brought the first painting by Raphael to the United States. Named after the celebrated Renaissance painter, this room commemorates his achievements and evokes the moment when Italian artists began looking to ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration.

Anders Zorn - Isabella Stewart Gardner In Venice (1894)

This vertical oil painting by the Swedish master, Zorn, depicts Isabella Stewart Gardner standing in a doorway with her arms outstretched. She is wearing a floor-length short-sleeved white dress, flowing almost like a nightgown.

Rembrandt - The Storm on the Sea of Galilee

The spot where Rembrandt’s incredible seascape once was, is now just an empty frame hung in the hopes that it might one day return.

Rembrandt - Self Portrait Aged 23 (1629)

At the time of this portrait's creation, Rembrandt was still a young, uncelebrated painter in his hometown, Leiden. Working as the master of his own tiny workshop, he honed his craft. Samuel van Hoogstraten, who studied with Rembrandt, later wrote a painting manual advocating self-portraiture as practice for capturing emotion, since it allowed the painter to be "both performer and beholder." Rembrandt's followers endlessly emulated his self-portraits, creating a whole subgenre eagerly sought by collectors.

Titian - The Rape Of Europa (1559-1562)

This painting was one of the “poesie” painted by Titian for Philip II of Spain. With the help of Bernard Berenson, Isabella Stewart Gardner bought Titian’s Rape of Europa from the Earl of Darnley in 1896, and it became the crown jewel of her museum’s growing collection. It has been theorized that Titian could have created this painting not due to any particular attachment to the subject, but in order to assert his abilities as a painter.

Sandro Botticelli - Virgin and Child with an Angel (1470-1474)

John Singer Sargent - Isabella Stewart Gardner (1888)

Mrs. Gardner sat for Sargent during his visit to Boston in January 1888. He was paid $3000 for the portrait, which was exhibited to great acclaim at Boston’s St. Botolph Club.

Regina Pizzeria at Fenway - 1330 Boylston Street Boston, MA 02215

After the Gardiner museum, I needed to refuel and found, by chance, what they call Boston’s original pizzeria, and it’s no wonder they’ve been serving pizza since 1926, it’s a great slice!

One of the highlights of the Harvard Art Museums, is the Forbes Pigment Collection, even though it’s not accessible to the public, it’s beautiful to look at from a distance.

The Harvard Art Museums Atrium at 32 Quincy Street

Visually excavating the museums' extraordinary collection, An Atlas of Rare & Familiar Colour examines the contained pigments and artefacts--their provenance, composition, symbology and application. It also explores the larger related fields of chromatics, the historical narratives of art and chemistry, and the innovations with which we have sought to better illustrate our aesthetic and expressive compulsions

On our last day, we had some time before our evening flight, so my wife suggested we head over to the Harvard Art Museums. I was immediately struck by how beautiful the Atrium was as we entered the museum at 32 Quincy Street. It’s a modern structure with greek classical lines and modern glass elements. The collections include approximately 250,000 objects in all media, ranging in date from antiquity to the present and originating in Europe, North America, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. We spent a lot of time wandering through each gallery.

At the very top of top floor, there is an intriguing display of color pigments neatly organized behind walls of glass. I eagerly wanted to get closer, but unless you’re a conservation scientist or student of Harvard, you can only view from a distance. The Forbes Pigment Collection is an assemblage of more than 2,700 pigments, binders, and other art materials for researchers to use as standards: so they can tell originals from restorations from forgeries. It's not open to the public, because it's a working research library -- and because some of the pigments in there are rare, historic, or really shouldn't be handled by anyone untrained. Though it’s difficult to see the entire collection up close, a special case across from the Level 4 stairwell displays a rotating selection of pigments, which gives interested visitors a sample of the ever-popular materials. They even have a sample of Vantablack

Before we left, I stopped into the gift shop to purchase a book called An Atlas of Rare & Familiar Colour that goes in depth about specific pigments in the Forbes Collection. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of color.

John Singer Sargent - Henry Lee Higginson (1903)

Cast in somber tones reminiscent of the Old Masters, the portrait emphasizes Higginson’s military service. The sitter’s Civil War cavalry cloak is spread across his lap, and a battle scar is visible on his right cheek.

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn - Portrait of an Old Man (1632)

Not a formal portrait, but a study of a generic type and emotional expression, this painting dates to a period shortly after the artist left his native Leiden and settled in Amsterdam. It shows the dramatic lighting and painstaking description of detail and texture that inform his early work. The signature, which Rembrandt used in this form only in 1632, consists of the monogram RHL — an abbreviation of Rembrandt Harmenszoon Leydensis (Rembrandt, son of Harmen, from Leiden) — followed by his surname.

Albert Bierstadt - Rocky Mountains "Lander's Peak" (1863)

This painting is based on sketches that Bierstadt completed in 1859 while serving on a U.S. government survey expedition led by Frederic W. Lander. Upon his return to New York, Bierstadt painted the work, which presents a composite scene rather than an accurate topographical rendering.

Vincent Van Gogh - Self Portrait (1888)

Van Gogh inscribed this painting “To my friend Paul Gauguin,” and sent it to him.

Watanabe Shikō 渡辺始興, Golden Landscape

John Singer Sargent - Street Scene - Cairo (1891)

One of a large group of observational studies of Cairo that Sargent made during the winter of 1890–91. Stray green traces of pigment and a horizontal impression in the lower third of the painting suggest that the work may have been pressed against another canvas in travel while still wet.

Jacques-Louis David - Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes (1817)

Following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, David was banished from France. He settled in Brussels, where he painted this portrait of Sieyès (1748– 1836), a fellow exile.

But the journey didn’t end there! Although there was little time left before our flight back to Toronto, I needed to see the famous murals at the Boston Public Library to round out my Sargent tour of the city. Murals usually aren’t my thing, but it’s a John Singer Sargent mural, so it peaked my interest. Titled Triumph of Religion, the ambitious public project spanned twenty-nine years of the prolific artist's career between 1890 and 1919. The murals incorporate a range of moments and iconography from early Egyptian and Assyrian belief systems, Judaism, and Christianity.