Vose Galleries of Boston

If you’ve had quite enough of the chi-​chi shopping and fancy dining of Newbury Street, this wonderful art gallery will provide the perfect respite.
As vertical as it is horizontal, there are five floors of paintings displayed in little rooms on each storey. There are just a handful of works per room, allowing you to never feel stuck in any one spot in your efforts to carefully consider each lovely scene hanging before you.
And you will want to give them the utmost consideration. Shows are seasonal, but on this occasion the theme was American landscapes. More specifically, vignettes exploring nature throughout the calendar all over New England. A Vermont mountain here, a country road in the Blackstone Corridor there. .. A mini travelogue of one of America’s most scenic pockets brought to you in oils, acrylics, water colors and even paper cuts.
Accompanying you through your travels are members of the staff seated at their desks, usually one to a floor, who are quite solicitous of aiding you with any questions that might strike you about the artists or compositions. Their presence is uniformly unobtrusive and every bit as helpful as you’d like it to be. So nice to be able to strike up a conversation about art with professionals and not feel a radiance of pretension wafting about the exchange.
The works are priced in a range where, if you’re just browsing off the street, you won’t experience buyers’ remorse from an impulse buy. This is serious art for serious collectors. But you will get a wonderful little education from both your own intellect seeking answers about technique, geography and art history as well as from the staff, always eager to fill in any gaps you can’t divine for yourself about the art.
Vose Galleries is a Boston institution, now in its fifth generation of ownership by the eponymous family. That the presentation is as fresh and exuberant as though its grand opening were days ago, reflects very strongly on the passion for collection and interchange that has characterized this remarkable institution of the Boston fine arts scene since the mid 19^th century.

I am no art connoisseur but I can say that the Vose Galleries is an impressive art gallery. Bill Vose, the current owner, is an alumni of my college and is an absolute doll. He held an event for our colleges last night so I was able to look around the galleries, admire the art and talk with him. This is the oldest family owned art gallery in the country, it is 171 years old! 6 generations of the Vose’s have runned this gallery. I love the charm of the townhouse it is – it is decorated to look and feel like a home. They have a lot of 19^th century art and some early 20^th century art. Currently they have a lot of Wyeth’s there and Offner sculptures (who was a Smith professor for many years but recently passed). There is a wide range of prices, ranging from $ 8,000 to over $ 100,000. If you are interested in seeing what they have, the staff is wonderful.
I definitely recommend it for anyone who is looking to invest in a nice piece of art.

This gallery shows a combination of paintings by living and deceased artists, as well as a few sculptures and antiques. The style is definitely traditional overall, with a combination of Impressionist, Academic, and Boston School artists represented, to name a few genres. The gallery itself is in an old townhouse that is furnished to look like a home.
Don’t think they’re closed — you have to be buzzed in to enter. And yes, that’s because the work is just THAT valuable.
I’ve said this in other reviews, but I prefer going to galleries over museums when I want to see traditional artwork. The admission is free, and if you ask the staff politely you can probably learn about how the artist painted the work, etc. There are always free flyers you can bring home for your art notebook, too.