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"With Éclat": The Boston Athenaeum and the Origin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Hina Hirayama. Boston: The Boston Athenaeum (distributed by University Press of New England), 2013. 240 pages, 81 illustrations. $29.95 (paperback).
The Boston Athenaeum, a membership library founded in 1807, was rooted in the Enlightenment belief that the world in all respects, "can be understood by the systematic attainment of knowledge" (13). Such knowledge could be acquired through the study of books, the observation of nature, or the contemplation of objects. The library's relationship with fine arts began in the 1820s with annual art exhibits. Eventually, an art collection was also formed, sharing space with books in a succession of cramped temporary quarters, before relocating to a donated mansion on Pearl Street in 1822. As Boston's nineteenth-century wealth accrued through maritime trade and textile manufacture, the city's "economic elite coalesced . . . into a self-conscious and increasingly insular group linked through business and family," a clique that controlled and financed most of the region's cultural and philanthropic enterprises (13). This closeknit nature of Boston's upper class was an important factor in the formation of institutional alliances.
Hina Hirayama's "With Eclat": The Boston Athenaeum and the Origin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, reconstructs...