Gardner, Isabella Stewart

See the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, home to some of the world's greatest masterpiecesSee all videos for this article

Isabella Stewart Gardner, née Isabella Stewart, (born April 14, 1840, New York, New York, U.S.—died July 17, 1924, Boston, Massachusetts), eclectic American socialite and art collector, a patron of many arts, remembered largely for the distinctive collection of European and Asian artworks that she assembled in Boston.

Isabella Stewart was the daughter of a wealthy businessman. In 1860 she married John L. Gardner, a member of a prominent and long-established Boston family. She adopted his city as her own, but Boston’s Brahmin society failed to reciprocate this openness. Her household was a quiet one until the 1870s, when, after a bout of illness and despondency and an exhilarating European convalescence, she began arranging social affairs that dazzled and occasionally titillated conservative Boston. A brilliant and unconventional woman, she attracted musicians, artists, and actors, and she came close to scandalizing Boston society by attending boxing matches. She became known as a patron of the Boston Symphony and of countless music students, for whom she once arranged a private recital by the pianist Ignacy Paderewski. She also developed a deep interest in the visual arts.

Advised by art critic Bernard Berenson, her onetime protégé, Gardner began collecting paintings and objets d’art and with her husband made numerous trips to Europe and Asia to add to her collection. After her husband’s death in 1898 she continued her interest in art, eventually assembling a fine collection of Renaissance and Dutch masterpieces interspersed with sculpture, Asian art, and major works by contemporaries such as John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler.

In 1899 she began to build a gallery in the form of an imitation 15th-century Italian villa on Fenway Court in Boston. She took an active part in the design and even the construction of the building, in which she arranged her art collection along with personal memorabilia. Opened to the public in January 1903, it was a fitting monument to one of the most exceptional women of the time. In accordance with her will, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was given to Boston as a public institution, with the proviso that the collection be maintained precisely as she had arranged it; nothing was to be added, removed, or rearranged. In 2009 a Massachusetts court overruled the strict terms of her will, allowing for an expansion that included a new building designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, which was completed in 2012.