Boston Public Library

The Boston Public Library, founded in 1848 as the first large free municipal public library in the United States, moved into its present flagship building on Copley Square in 1895. Designed by the architect Charles Follen McKim of the firm McKim, Mead and White, the building's Renaissance Revival design deliberately evoked the grand civic palazzi of Italian Renaissance cities, with an inscription over its entrance declaring the library free to all. Its interior includes murals by the French painter Puvis de Chavannes and by John Singer Sargent, whose extensive cycle depicting the history of religion occupies the library's third floor, alongside a courtyard modeled on an Italian cloister. The McKim building was expanded in 1972 with an addition by the architect Philip Johnson, built in a contrasting modernist style intended to complement rather than imitate the original structure. The library's Copley Square building is widely regarded as one of the most architecturally significant public library buildings constructed in the United States.