Pearls, Scarlet Ribbons, and a Museum of Dreams

There is a wisdom that says we spend our adult years trying to return to our most youthful and authentic selves. Away from the draperies of society’s norms and the burdens of personal scars, we search for a way to become, in a cliché yet apt and simple phrase, our true selves. Few embodied this pursuit as boldly, or as memorably, as Isabella Stewart Gardner.

Born in New York City in 1840, she was sent to Paris as a teenager, where she discovered art, music, and a hunger for beauty that would define her life. In 1860 she married John Lowell “Jack” Gardner, moving to Boston society, though she often bent its rules more than she followed them.

After the devastating loss of their only child in 1865, Isabella and Jack began traveling widely—Italy, Egypt, Japan—collecting art and objects along the way. Out of grief and curiosity grew a vision of a museum that would bring the world’s beauty to Boston.

In 1903 she opened the doors of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a Venetian palace on the Fenway. She curated it herself, mixing Titian paintings with Chinese bronzes, rare books with orchids. Every room carried her sense of intimacy and grandeur.

Isabella continued to host artists, musicians, and writers until her death in 1924. Her will left strict instructions that the museum must remain exactly as she arranged it. Nearly a century later, visitors still wander her halls much as she once did, surrounded by treasures and whispers of her daring.

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Notes

Read a snapshot biography about Emily Warren Roebling & her work on building the Brooklyn Bridge.

Sources

• “Isabella Stewart Gardner as Book Collector and Reader.” Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, https://youtu.be/OTel4euCvbU
• Tharp, Louise Hall. Mrs. Jack: A Biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner. United States, Little, Brown, 1965.
• “TPL: The Gilded World of Isabella Stewart Gardner.” Tewksbury TV, https://youtu.be/zbjHsF4dTqg
• Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Singer_Sargent_-_Isabella_Stewart_Gardner,_1888.jpg