The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston possesses one of the world's finest collections of nineteenth-century French and American art. This colourful book, the catalogue of an exhibition at the Royal Academy, illustrates many of its highlights. As she outlines the history of the collection, Erica Hirshler considers the taste in Boston for atmospheric landscapes which, by the late 1880s, had led young Boston painters to Monet's door. Their willingness to embrace Impressionism helped to popularize this style of painting throughout the United States. All the high points of Boston's nineteenth-century collections are revealed here, with works by the leading French Impressionist painters and their American counterparts, such as Childe Hassam and Philip Hale.

Erica Hirshler is Chief Curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston