A house for a public imagination
Chapter 01
Making a museum
Isabella Stewart Gardner assembled art from different cultures and periods and created a Venetian-inspired museum in Boston. It opened to the public in 1903.
Chapter 02
A life in the archive
The museum’s biography draws on Gardner’s personal archive. Her papers offer another perspective: collecting is documented through correspondence, relationships and the practical work of making a museum.
Chapter 03
An authored setting
A collection is also an arrangement. The way visitors move between objects can carry something of its founder’s choices, while later scholarship keeps revisiting the person behind them. Gardner’s story invites attention to the space around an artwork as much as the artwork itself.
Follow the source