The museum is located on the historic Golden Square Mile stretch of Sherbrooke Street west.

In addition he donated to the Montreal institution a building site on the north-east corner of Phillips Square and further the sum of money of $8,000.

The museum was enlarged in 1893 by founding member G. Drummond's nephew, Andrew Thomas Taylor, with decorative carving by sculptor Henry Beaumont.

Trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition, they proposed a building that catered to French taste of the time: sober and majestic.

On December 9, 1912, the Governor General of Canada, Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, inaugurated the new Museum of the Art Association of Montreal on Sherbrooke Street West in front of 3,000 people present for the occasion.

[23] On September 4, 1972, the museum was the site of the largest art theft in Canadian history, when armed thieves made off with jewellery, figurines and 18 paintings worth a total of $2 million at the time (approximately $14.3 million today), including works by Delacroix, Gainsborough and a rare Rembrandt landscape (Landscape with Cottages).

One painting, believed at the time to have been a Jan Brueghel the Elder but later reattributed to one of his students, was returned by the thieves as a way of opening ransom negotiations; the rest have never been recovered.

Late in October 2011, about eight weeks after the original theft, a similarly sized sandstone relief of a guard's head dating to 5th-century-BCE Persia was stolen the same way.

The SQ, in conjunction with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, executed a search warrant and recovered the Persian piece in January 2014.

He and the prosecutors agreed that while he did not know the relief had been stolen, he could have taken more steps to ascertain that it had not been than just doing a Google search on "Is a Mesopotamian artifact missing?"

He received a conditional discharge with probation and community service as his sentence; a character in the 2016 film Yoga Hosers was inspired by him after the story was reported in the media.

On February 14, 2007, the museum's administration board announced its project to convert the Église Erskine and American [fr], located on Sherbrooke West street, into a Canadian art pavilion.

[32][33] It was named the Claire and Marc Bourgie pavilion, as a recognition of the family's considerable financial support, and opened in 2010.

[34] In the late 19th and early 20th century, the large art collections owned by many prominent Montreal families became dispersed through shared inheritance.

However, some heirs made large donations to the museum, such members of the Drummond, Angus, Van Horne, and Hosmer families, among others.

[36] Since 1955, the museum gained the acquisition funds it needed to buy Canadian or foreign works from the legacy of Horsley and Annie Townsend.

Other donations come from new donors such as Joseph Arthur Simard, who in 1959 offered a collection of 3,000 Japanese incense boxes that belonged to the French statesman Georges Clemenceau.

[37] In 1960, the centennial of the founding of the Art Association of Montreal was highlighted by the publication of a catalog of selected works from the collection and a museum guide.

[38] These gifts expanded the range of the museum's collections, and reached a peak in 2000, with admission of the modern design collection assembled by Liliane M. Stewart and David M. Stewart, long a part of the Montreal Decorative Arts Museum and exhibited at the MMFA from 1997 to 2000.

[41] In 2005, the heirs of Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker requested the return of The Deification of Aeneas, a 17th-century work by Charles Le Brun.

[42][43] In 2013, the museum returned Gerrit van Honthorst's The Duet (1623–24) to the heirs of Jewish art collector Bruno Spiro, from whom it had been confiscated by the Nazis.