Museum of Fine Arts

The Museum of Fine Arts holds over 500,000 works spanning 5,000 years, making it one of the largest and most comprehensive art museums in the world. The collection's strengths are distinctive — the finest collection of Japanese art outside Japan, the most important group of Claude Monet paintings outside Paris, an Egyptian collection that rivals the Met's, and an American art wing that traces the country's visual culture from colonial portraiture to contemporary installation.

The Impressionist galleries are the museum's crown jewel. The MFA has 38 Monets — including multiple versions of his haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, and water lilies — along with major works by Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, and Manet. The gallery arrangement allows you to see how the movement evolved from early experiments in outdoor light to the near-abstractions of Monet's late water lily paintings, which influenced abstract expressionism decades later.

The building itself has grown over more than a century — the original 1909 Beaux-Arts structure by Guy Lowell has been expanded with the I.M. Pei West Wing (1981), the Foster + Partners American Wing (2010), and the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art (2011). The Art of the Americas Wing is particularly impressive — four floors tracing American art from pre-Columbian ceramics to contemporary work, housed in a building that lets natural light flood the galleries. The museum's free Wednesday evening hours (after 4pm) are one of Boston's best cultural deals.