A Greyhound bus, jewels, haute couture — all in a show about a remarkable collector

A model of a 1950s Greyhound Scenicruiser is among the items in the MFA exhibit in honor of the late Fred Sharf. Encyclopedic institutions like the Museum of Fine Arts rarely have encyclopedic donors Collecting art, as a matter of either taste or pocketbook, hasn’t worked that way for a long, long time That’s one of the things that made Frederic A.

Sharf special He and his wife, Jean, donated 7440 works to the museum over several decades That number is not a typo.

While not interested in the full set, he knew his way around multiple volumes of the encyclopedia, all of them highly engaging. Sharf died last year, at 83 In his honor, the MFA has mounted a small, highly appealing show, “Fred Sharf — Renaissance Man.” It runs through July 22. A photograph of Sharf hangs at the beginning of the exhibition The man shown has a bullet head, a. More