Isabella Stewart Gardner

Her father sold linen in New York and made a fortune at it. At 16 she was in Paris at school with Boston girls, and one of them had a brother — John Lowell Gardner, called Jack, whom she married in 1860 and followed to a house on Beacon Street. Their son was born in June 1863 and died of pneumonia in March 1865, not quite two. A miscarriage followed, and doctors told her there would be no more children. She stopped going out. What they finally prescribed was travel, and in 1867 she was carried aboard a ship on a stretcher. She came back a different woman, and she had started keeping scrapbooks.

Her father died in 1891 and left her 1.75 million dollars. The next year she bought Vermeer's The Concert at auction in Paris, and in 1894 Bernard Berenson began advising her — he helped acquire nearly 70 works, among them Titian's The Rape of Europa, a Botticelli, Rembrandts, and Piero della Francesca's Hercules. She was buying before American museums were competing. After Jack died in 1898 she built Fenway Court, a Venetian palazzo in the Fenway, and spent a year hanging the collection herself. It opened privately on January 1, 1903, and to the public later that year.

The will is the strange part, and it still binds. Gardner left the museum on the condition that nothing in the galleries be moved, added or sold — her arrangement is the arrangement, and if it is permanently altered the whole collection goes to auction in Paris and the proceeds to Harvard. The museum cannot rehang a room and cannot lend freely. The empty frames from the 1990 theft still hang where the paintings were. Boston thought her eccentric, and she did not discourage it. When Sargent showed his 1888 portrait of her, the neckline scandalized the city and, by most accounts, Jack asked her not to exhibit it publicly again while he lived. The stories about her are numerous enough that separating record from anecdote is genuinely hard.

She had a stroke in 1919 and died on July 17, 1924, in her apartment on the museum's fourth floor, and was buried at Mount Auburn between her husband and her son. Early on March 18, 1990, two men in police uniforms talked their way through the door, tied up the night guards and left with 13 works — Vermeer's The Concert, two Rembrandt paintings and an etching, a Govert Flinck landscape, a Manet, five Degas drawings, a Chinese bronze beaker and a Napoleonic eagle finial. It is still the largest unsolved art theft on record. Nothing has been recovered. Under the terms of her will, the frames stay on the wall.

Isabella Stewart Gardner's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Fenway Court building
  A Venetian palazzo built in Boston with architect Willard T. Sears 1903
• The gallery installations other
  Thousands of objects arranged room by room over a year, and fixed by her will 1903
• Travel scrapbooks and albums other
  Begun on the trip her doctors prescribed and kept for the rest of her life 1867
• Acquisition of Vermeer's The Concert artwork
  Bought at a Paris auction — her first major purchase, and stolen in 1990 1892
• Acquisition of Titian's The Rape of Europa artwork
  Brokered by Bernard Berenson and still the centerpiece of the museum 1896
• Endowment and will other
  One million dollars, and the rule that nothing in the galleries be changed 1924

• 1857 aged ~17 Sees the Poldi Pezzoli collection in Milan and says she wants a house like it A private collection arranged in rooms designed to evoke other eras. She was 17.
• April 10, 1860 aged 19 Marries John Lowell Gardner Jr. at Grace Church in New York Her father gave the couple a house at 152 Beacon Street in Boston.
• March 15, 1865 aged 24 Their only child dies of pneumonia at 20 months A miscarriage followed within a year, and she was told she could bear no more children.
• 1867 aged ~27 Carried aboard ship on a stretcher for the European trip her doctors prescribed Almost a year abroad. It worked, and it started the collecting.
• 1888 aged ~48 Sargent shows his portrait of her at the St. Botolph Club and Boston is scandalized Jack Gardner asked that it not be shown publicly again while he lived.
• 1891 aged ~51 Inherits 1.75 million dollars from her father and begins collecting in earnest
• 1892 aged ~52 Buys Vermeer's The Concert at a Paris auction One of roughly 34 paintings attributed to Vermeer. It has been missing since 1990.
• January 1, 1903 aged 62 Fenway Court opens with a private concert by members of the Boston Symphony Champagne and doughnuts. The public was admitted later that year.
• July 17, 1924 aged 84 Dies in her apartment on the fourth floor of the museum She had suffered the first of a series of strokes in 1919.

• John Singer Sargent 1856–1925
  Painted the Gilded Age at full length, then closed the portrait studio at the height of the demand. patron of
• Henry James 1843–1916
  Novelist whose intricate explorations of consciousness and society bridged American and European literature. corresponded with
• J. P. Morgan 1837–1913
  Banking titan who stabilized the economy during the Panic of 1907 and shaped modern finance. rival collector
• Andrew Carnegie 1835–1919
  Steel magnate who built one of the largest steel empires in history and later became a major philanthropist. fellow benefactor