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The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has assembled one of North America’s finest encyclopedic collections, totalling over 33,000 objects.

When the new museum was built, the Art Association’s council had expressed the desire to extend its field of activities to cover the decorative arts—as many other North American institutions were doing at the turn of the century. The department of decorative arts was created in 1917 and was entrusted to Frederick Cleveland Morgan, who served as voluntary keeper of the collection from 1917 until his death in 1962. An enthusiastic collector and indefatigable keeper, Morgan is reputed to have garnered more than 7,000 items for the museum over this period, in the form of purchases, bequests, and gifts. As manager of the decorative-arts section in the family department-store of Henry Morgan & Co., Morgan was called upon to travel all over the world, and he made use of these trips to expand the museum’s collections.

Drawing its inspiration from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art Association’s department of decorative arts initially saw itself as fulfilling an educational function and adopted a method of classifying objects based on techniques and materials. Little by little, however, the collection became more diverse, and from the 1930s it turned into a huge and encyclopaedic panorama featuring every continent and every age. From its inception, the department had been known as a ‘museum’—a term that can be applied to all kinds of collections, whereas an ‘art gallery’ is generally a museum of painting and sculpture. Because of the size of the department, however, the institution eventually adopted a name that encompassed all the collections, and in 1948 it became the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It was not until the 1960s that the name was officially made bilingual.