Boston Design School

The school was founded as the Massachusetts Bay College of Picture Drawing in 1670 close by the Boston Common in what is now the theater district. Known throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as simply “The Boston School,” the school outgrew its Washington Street address and moved to the Whitman Mansion in Watertown in 1888. Charles Whitman, Jr. had been a student in the Boston School in the mid nineteenth century but was unable to make a career as an artist. Instead, he followed his father into paper manufacturing and made his fortune by inventing the paper bag. He bequeathed the mansion and the surrounding property to the school on his death. There was some thought of naming the school after Whitman, but more traditional voices among the trustees and faculty won out and in a compromise settled on naming the building and grounds after the benefactor. So we have Whitman Hall and the Whitman Quad. In the latter half of the twentieth century, factions within the school began to agitate for a name more modern and in keeping with the times, feeling that it would make the school more attractive to young people, who were becoming increasingly more bohemian and anti-establishmentarian. Others felt that keeping that sort out was exactly the point. In 1972, in another compromise, the Massachusetts Bay College of Picture Drawing changed its name to the Massachusetts Bay College of Picture Drawing Informally Known as the Boston Design School in 2003. So people could pretty much call it whatever they pleased and it would still be “official.” Now informally known as the Boston Design School, and named thus here on the web and in marketing materials, the school is generally referred to on campus as The Boston School or BDS or even “Mass Draw” by some young Turks. This is, however, frowned upon.