Boston Art Club
arts organization in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. (1854–now)
The Boston Art Club is an arts organization in Boston, Massachusetts, which serves to help its members, as well as non-members, to access the world of fine art. It currently has more than 250 members.
History
The Boston Art Club was first conceived in Boston in 1854 with the consolidation of efforts between local artists, including Benjamin Champney, Alfred Ordway, Samuel Lancaster Gerry and Walter Brackett. Their desire was to form a democratic organization where the European tradition of independent, master-artists would be replaced with cooperation in the promotion, sale and education of art.
They held their first official meeting on New Year's Day, 1855, when they named themselves the Boston Art Club. They elected three presidents: Joseph Alexander Ames, Walter Brackett, and Benjamin Champney. It is not known why they chose three Presidents that first year. The only other two officers elected were a Treasurer and a Recording Secretary. It is said that there were twenty founding Members that also included Francis Seth Frost, Samuel W. Griggs, Edward Pressey, Frederick Dickinson Williams, and Moses Wright. The Members were a combination of Academically trained Artists who had studied in Europe, and Artists who picked up their trade studying with local Boston Artists teaching in the old European tradition of Master/Student.
“Boston Art Club” enters the record as arts organization in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. (1854–now). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Boston, Club and arts can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4947732. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1854 and 1855.
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This entry incorporates text from “Boston Art Club” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.