Education and Early Career

The Morse Collection
Edward Sylvester Morse, from Salem, Massachusetts, was a zoologist who lived in Japan in the 1870s and fell in love with traditional Japanese culture. Morse systematically recorded all that he observed in Japan and also formed an enormous collection of ancient and contemporary Japanese pottery. When he returned to Massachusetts, Morse published Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings and gave wildly popular public lectures on Japanese art and culture, helping to fuel a “Japan craze” that swept Boston and the nation. In 1888, the very year the Greenes moved to Boston, the MFA began a public fundraising campaign to purchase Morse’s pottery collection. Two years later, even as funds were still being sought in newspaper advertisements and editorials, the pottery was installed at the Museum, under Morse’s supervision. This display recreates part of Morse’s case number thirty-one, just as the Greenes would have seen it in 1890.

Text courtesy of Nonie Gadsden, Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Art of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston