by If you ever have a chance to go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, you simply must, even if you don’t like art. It is simply crazy and astounding and a wonder to behold.
Doug and I had visited a few years ago, but we recently listened to a biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Chasing Beauty by Natalie Dykstra (affiliate link). After listening, I had to go back to see it again while we were in Boston. It didn’t take long before I was texting Doug, “It’s just as crazy as we remembered.”
The museum contains paintings, sculptures, letters, tapestries, church pews, furniture – honestly, anything that caught Gardner’s fancy. It was her museum from start to finish, her collection gathered over the years knowing she would create the museum.
Gardner (1840–1924) began her collection in earnest after receiving a $1.75 million inheritance from her father in 1891 (about $61 million today, so nothing out-of-the-ordinary). Her first major purchase was Johannes Vermeer’s The Concert (c. 1664), which she acquired for $6,000. She went on to collect many famous names: Botticelli, Rembrandt, Titian, Michelangelo, Manet, Degas, Whistler, Sargent, Matisse. You get the idea.
The museum was built 1898–1901 in the style of a 15th-century Venetian palace, with Gardner involved in every aspect of the design. Gardner spent a year installing her collection in combinations to evoke “intimate responses.” It opened as a museum in 1903. At the time, Gardner was living on the top floor, and the museum was open on a very limited schedule.
There is art and decorative objects literally stuffed everywhere. The walls are jam packed with art (none of it labeled), but so are the hallways. When you walk through a door, it’s probably a work of art, too. The ceiling? Yeah, that’s something, too.
The collection includes “7500 paintings, sculptures, furniture, textiles, silver, ceramics, 1500 rare books, and 7000 archival objects from ancient Rome, Medieval Europe, Renaissance Italy, Asia, the Islamic world, and 19th-century France and America.”
The museum is famous for being the victim of a still-unsolved robbery in which 13 works of art were stolen. There’s a fascinating look at it on Netflix called This is a Robbery, and the story is just as crazy as the museum itself is. I also listened to a more recent (and serious) podcast on it, Last Seen produced by WBUR.
The building has an amazing courtyard full of flowers. Of course – of course – I made that a separate post. And perhaps predictably, and I made another post focused on the art itself. Fight me.
The cover photo is of the “Tapestry Room,” which “evokes a great hall in a northern European castle.” Gardner used this space for concerts when she was still living here.
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