About the museum
The story of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston opened in 1903 in a Venetian-style palazzo that the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner built around a flower-filled courtyard. Her will required that the galleries stay exactly as she arranged them.
Its rooms hold Titian, Rembrandt, Botticelli and Sargent. They are also known for the empty frames left after the 1990 theft of thirteen works, including Vermeer's The Concert, one of the most famous unsolved art crimes.
The collection
Isabella Stewart Gardner bought with the advice of the young art historian Bernard Berenson, acquiring Titian's The Rape of Europa, then considered the most important Italian painting in America, as well as Botticelli, Raphael and Rembrandt.
She was also a friend and patron of living artists such as John Singer Sargent, whose El Jaleo fills a Spanish cloister in the museum, and Anders Zorn. The collection mixes paintings with furniture, textiles, manuscripts and letters.
At ArtLogia you can order 18 of its paintings as hand-painted reproductions, by 16 artists led by Sandro Botticelli, Johannes Vermeer and Titian.
- paintings to order
- 18
- artists
- 16
- art movements
- 6
- years covered
- 1320–1882
The building
Fenway Court, as she called it, was built in 1899–1901 around a glass-roofed courtyard planted with flowers that change with the seasons. Renzo Piano added a separate wing for concerts and exhibitions in 2012, so the original house could remain as she left it.
Masterpieces to see
Planning a visit
Anyone named Isabella gets free admission for life, a tradition the museum still keeps.
