Isabella Stewart Gardner
Isabella Stewart Gardner was an art collector and patron of the arts, remembered especially for the distinctive collection of European and Asian artworks that she assembled in Boston for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum that opened in 1903.
Born in New York City to a wealthy merchant family, she was educated in New York and Paris. She was a friend of noted artists, intellectuals, and writers, including John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Dennis Miller Bunker, Anders Zorn, Henry James, Dodge MacKnight, Okakura Kakuzō, Francis Marion Crawford, and Bernard Berenson, an art historian who advised her on collecting art.
In 1867, following the death of her young son two years earlier, she and her husband Jack began a year of travels, visiting Scandinavia and Russia but spending most of their time in Paris. The trip became a turning point in her life, restoring her health and sparking a life-long interest in recording her experiences. In 1874, the Gardners visited the Middle East, Central Europe, and Paris. Beginning in the late 1880s, they frequently traveled across America, Europe, and Asia to discover foreign cultures and expand their knowledge of art. In 1878, she attended the readings of Charles Eliot Norton, the first professor of art history at Harvard University; he invited her to join the Dante Society. With Norton’s encouragement, she began collecting rare books and manuscripts, beginning with early editions of Dante’s works.
During her trips abroad, Gardner also began collecting art. One of the first major paintings she acquired was The Concert by Vermeer (c. 1664), purchased at a Paris auction in 1892, but her collection expanded to include works from Egypt, Turkey, and Asia. In the 1890s, she rapidly built a world-class collection, primarily of paintings and sculpture, but also tapestries, photographs, silver, ceramics, manuscripts, and architectural elements, such as doors, stained glass, and mantelpieces.
After her husband’s death in 1898, Isabella realized their shared dream of building a museum for their collections by purchasing land in the marshy Fenway area of Boston and hiring architect Willard T. Sears to build a museum modeled on Venetian Renaissance palaces. With Gardner involved in every aspect of its design, the building, known as Fenway Court until it was renamed after her death, completely surrounds a glass-covered garden courtyard, the first of its kind in America.