Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a museum in Boston, Massachusetts dedicated primarily to European art.

The museum was established in 1903 by Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924), a wealthy patron of the arts. It is housed in a building designed to evoke a Venetian Renaissance palazzo, but it was built entirely from the ground up in Boston, out of new materials, but incorporating numerous architectural fragments from European Gothic and Renaissance structures. The antique elements are seamlessly worked into the design of the turn-of-the-century building. Special tiles were custom designed for the floors, modern concrete was used for some of the structural elements, and antique capitals sit atop modern columns. The glass courtyard roof, originally made with wood, was later updated with metal to hold the many glass panes together. The building was not brought to America from Venice and reconstructed; that is a common misconception.

The museum has a small but outstanding collection of paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles, ceramics, prints, drawings, manuscripts, rare books, jewelry, and Japanese screens. It is particularly rich in Italian Renaissance paintings, as well as in 19th-century works by John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler. The first Matisse to enter an American collection is housed there.

The Gardner Museum is much admired for the intimate atmosphere in which its works of art are displayed and its flower-filled courtyard.

On the night of March 18, 1990, thieves disguised as police officers broke into the museum and stole a dozen works of art, including a work by Vermeer ("The Concert") and three Rembrandts. It is considered the biggest art theft in US history and remains unsolved. In her will, Gardner instructed that the collection not be changed or reorganised; hence the empty frames from which the canvases were cut still hang.

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