In front of you rises a Venetian palazzo built around a hidden courtyard, the private obsession of a woman Boston society never quite knew what to do with. Isabella Stewart Gardner was born in New York, married into Boston wealth, and spent decades collecting art on a scale that astonished even the wealthiest of her contemporaries. She built this Venetian palazzo around an interior courtyard, filled it with the paintings, tapestries, furniture, and objects she had collected across Europe over forty years, and opened it to the public in 1903 while she still lived in the fourth-floor apartment above.
Her will specified that the collection must remain exactly as she arranged it, with nothing moved, sold, or added; any violation would require the entire collection to be sold and the proceeds given to Harvard. The arrangement is still intact, though thirteen works — including Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Vermeer's The Concert, and Manet's Chez Tortoni — were stolen in the largest art theft in history on March 18, 1990. Their empty frames remain on the walls where Gardner hung them.
The Gardner Museum is also the site of an extraordinary crime scene that remains unsolved: the thieves were never caught and the paintings have never been found.