Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Venetian-style palace round a glazed courtyard, its collection arranged as its founder left it.
Isabella Stewart Gardner assembled her collection across three decades of travel and built Fenway Court to hold it, opening the doors to guests on New Year's Day 1903. Willard T. Sears carried out her designs for a four-storey house wrapped around a glass-roofed courtyard planted in the manner of a Venetian garden, incorporating salvaged columns, capitals, balconies and window surrounds shipped from Italy. Her will required that nothing be added, moved or sold, so the galleries remain arranged exactly as she left them.
The rooms hold works by Titian, Rembrandt, Botticelli, Vermeer, Piero della Francesca, Manet, Degas and John Singer Sargent, shown beside tapestries, furniture, manuscripts and Asian ceramics without labels. In March 1990 thieves took thirteen works, including Vermeer's 'The Concert' and Rembrandt's only seascape; their empty frames still hang in place. A wing by Renzo Piano, added in 2012, provides a concert hall, galleries for temporary shows and a greenhouse, leaving the historic palace untouched.
Highlights
- Glass-roofed courtyard with Roman mosaic and changing seasonal planting
- Empty frames left from the unsolved theft of 1990
- Titian's 'The Rape of Europa' in the Titian Room
- Renzo Piano wing of 2012 with Calderwood Hall concerts
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