The woman who built her own museum
Isabella Stewart Gardner was born in New York in 1840, married a Boston Brahmin, and spent the next four decades becoming the most interesting person in the city. She collected art at a time when women weren't expected to be serious collectors. She befriended Henry James, John Singer Sargent, and Bernard Berenson. She wore Red Sox colours to the symphony. She kept a lion cub.
In 1898, she began building Fenway Court — a Venetian palazzo constructed brick by brick from her own design, with a central courtyard garden that blooms year-round regardless of the Boston winter outside. She moved in in 1902 and opened the building to the public in 1903. She lived in the fourth-floor apartment until her death in 1924.
Her will left the museum in a trust with an unusual condition: nothing in the collection could be moved, loaned, sold, or rearranged. The works must remain exactly as she placed them. If that condition is ever violated, the entire collection goes to Harvard and the building is torn down.
Start in the courtyard
The central courtyard is the emotional core of the museum. It's a Venetian garden — stone columns, ancient architectural fragments, flowering plants, a Roman mosaic floor — enclosed under a glass ceiling four stories above. The light changes through the day. In winter, when the city outside is grey and cold, the courtyard is in full bloom.
Sit for a few minutes before you go upstairs. It calibrates the rest of the visit.
Titian's Europa
The Titian Room on the third floor contains The Rape of Europa (c. 1560–62), one of the finest paintings in the United States and the only Titian poesia in an American collection. Philip II of Spain commissioned the series from Titian in the 1550s — mythological subjects, painted in his late, atmospheric manner, with loose brushwork that prefigures Impressionism by three hundred years.
Europa rides on the back of Jupiter in the form of a white bull, attended by cupids. The sky behind her is vast and unsettled. Rubens made a copy of it. Velázquez studied it. It's that kind of painting.
The empty frames
On the night of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as Boston police officers bluffed their way into the museum, tied up the two guards on duty, and spent 81 minutes removing thirteen works from the walls. They took a Vermeer (The Concert), three Rembrandts, five Degas drawings, a Manet, a Flinck, a Govaert Flinck, and the finial from a Napoleonic flag.
The works have never been recovered. They are worth an estimated $500 million — the largest art theft in history. The FBI has leads but no convictions. The museum is legally prohibited from replacing the missing works. The empty frames remain on the walls, exactly where the paintings were hanging that night, because the will requires that nothing be moved.
Standing in front of an empty frame where a Vermeer used to be is one of the stranger experiences in American art. The Dutch Room, where most of the stolen works hung, is on the third floor.
Sargent throughout
John Singer Sargent was one of Gardner's closest friends and the museum holds an exceptional group of his work — portraits, watercolours, and oil studies. His large portrait of Gardner herself hangs in the Gothic Room. He painted it in 1888 when she was 48; she's depicted in black, pearls, and what her husband reportedly described as an expression of satisfaction. Sargent said it was the best thing he'd ever done.
Practical notes
Book tickets in advance, particularly on weekends — the museum is small and capacity is genuinely limited. The audio guide is among the better museum audio experiences in Boston; use it. The cafe in the modern wing serves good food. If your name is Isabella, admission is free — Gardner wrote it into the terms of the bequest, and the museum still honours it.