The MFA and the Gardner: Planning a Boston Museum Day

Boston's two best-known art museums stand a short walk apart near the Fenway, and visiting both in one day is a mistake. They demand completely different kinds of attention.

The Museum of Fine Arts

The MFA is an encyclopaedic museum: a very large institution with collections spanning ancient Egypt, Asia, Europe, the Americas and contemporary work, in a building that has been extended repeatedly.

Its Art of the Americas wing and its holdings of American painting are particular strengths, as is its Japanese collection, which is among the most significant outside Japan.

The practical consequence of an encyclopaedic museum is that you cannot see it in a visit and should not try. Pick two or three areas and accept that you are leaving most of it. Visitors who attempt the whole building leave exhausted having absorbed nothing.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

The Gardner is the opposite proposition. It is the collection of one person, installed in a building she designed around it, and by the terms of her will the arrangement of the collection cannot be changed.

The result is a Venetian-style palace built around a covered courtyard garden, with rooms arranged as she left them rather than by period or school. Works are hung densely, unlabelled in the conventional sense, in an arrangement that reflects one collector's judgment rather than a curatorial argument.

It is also the site of the most famous unsolved art theft in the world. In 1990 thieves took a number of works, including a Vermeer and a Rembrandt, and they have never been recovered. Because the will forbids rearranging the collection, the empty frames remain hanging where the paintings were. Standing in front of them is a genuinely strange experience and, for many visitors, the thing they remember most.

A long-standing quirk of the museum's admission policy: anyone named Isabella gets in free. It is real, it is charming, and it is worth mentioning if you happen to qualify.

How to plan

Do one per day. They reward different modes: the MFA rewards selection and stamina, the Gardner rewards slow attention in a small number of rooms.

Check current hours and closure days for each before going. Both have days they are not open, and this is the most common way a museum trip fails.

Check whether tickets need to be booked in advance, particularly for the Gardner, whose capacity is limited by the nature of the building.

Getting there

Both are near the Green Line E branch along Huntington Avenue, and both are within walking distance of the Fenway area. This is the same corridor that serves the Longwood Medical Area, so expect the trains to be busy at commuting hours.

If you are combining a museum with a Red Sox game, note that the ballpark is close by and the neighbourhood transforms entirely on a game day. That is either a bonus or a reason to pick another afternoon, depending on your temperament.