Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
- Architect
- Willard Thomas Sears
- Year
- 1903
- City
- Boston, MA
Isabella Stewart Gardner built this museum in the Fenway between 1898 and 1901, in the style of a 15th-century Venetian palace, to house the personal art collection she assembled after receiving a large inheritance in 1891 — her first major purchase was Vermeer's The Concert, bought at a Paris auction in 1892. It opened to the public in 1903, fulfilling her will's instruction that the collection be exhibited "for the education and enjoyment of the public forever."
the building
A Venetian palace in the Fens. Architect Willard Thomas Sears built the museum as a recreation of a 15th-century Venetian palace, an unusual form for a purpose-built American museum housing one collector's holdings of European, Asian, and American paintings, sculpture, tapestries, and decorative arts.
The Piano wing. An auxiliary wing designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, sited adjacent to the original building near the Back Bay Fens, was completed in 2012, adding modern gallery and event space beside Sears's original palace.
the style
Modeled directly on a 15th-century Venetian palace, a deliberate departure from the classical or Gothic idioms more common among American museums of the period, chosen to evoke the Old World settings of Gardner's own collecting travels.
the architect
Willard Thomas Sears is documented here chiefly as the architect who translated Gardner's Venetian-palace concept into the completed 1903 building.
significance
In 1990, thirteen works were stolen from the museum in a theft that remains unsolved; the works, valued at an estimated $500 million, have never been recovered. The museum is an Approved Boston Landmark (#137, designated 2013) and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
nearby
- Museum of Fine Arts Boston
- Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral of New England
- Basilica and Shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help
- Landmark Center
- Fenway Park
- Boston Young Men's Christian Association