Boston Public Library

 In 1887 the prestigious New York firm of McKim, Mead, and White was chosen to design Boston's new library. In 1888, Charles Follen McKim proposed a Renaissance style design based on the Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève in Paris. The trustees of the library approved, and construction commenced. 

The library is in Back Bay on Copley Square, the prominent corner of Boylston Street and Dartmouth Street, opposite Richardson's Trinity Church.  

Two allegorical statues by Bela Pratt were installed in 1912 and frame the entrance to the library, representing Science (above, holding a globe) and Art (holding a palette and brush).

Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Sculptor Domingo Mora carved the head of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, below the library’s motto: FREE TO ALL.

One of the most striking features of the main staircase is the pair of lions that memorialize two Massachusetts volunteer infantries in the Civil War. Surviving members of the regiments funded the sculptures by Louis Saint-Gaudens, who, under time pressure, delivered the marble figures before he could polish them. The lions remain unpolished at the request of the regiment survivors, who thought that the effect of the raw carved marble was ideal.

One of many busts in the Bates Reading Room is this bronze of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Artist John Singer Sargent spent 29 years of his career adorning this hall on the third floor of the McKim Building between 1890 and 1919.  Sargent's theme, Triumph of Religion, incorporates a broad range of moments and iconography from early Egyptian and Assyrian belief systems, Judaism, and Christianity.