Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Isabella Stewart Gardner was a New York-born, Boston society figure known for ignoring convention, and she poured a family fortune into art. With her advisers, among them a young Bernard Berenson, she gathered works by Titian, Rembrandt, Botticelli, Vermeer, and Sargent, along with sculpture, manuscripts, textiles, and objects from many cultures. Rather than a conventional gallery, she wanted a place where art lived together in beautiful rooms.

She built her palace, called Fenway Court, at the turn of the 20th century, modeling it on the Venetian palazzi she loved, with the galleries facing inward onto the covered courtyard. She arranged every room herself, and her will stipulated that the collection remain exactly as she left it, or else be sold and the museum closed. Because of that, you see the art as one strong-willed person chose to see it, more than a century ago.

The glass-roofed courtyard is the soul of the museum and one of the great interior spaces in Boston. Rising four stories, filled with light, and framed by carved stone, columns, and mosaics gathered from Europe, it holds a garden that the museum's horticulturists change through the year, so there is always something in bloom.

The most famous of these displays is the hanging of nasturtiums, whose long vines are trained to spill many feet down from the upper balconies in early spring, a tradition kept in Gardner's memory. Whatever the season, the courtyard makes the museum feel warm and alive, a green room at the center of a stone palace.

In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two men in stolen police uniforms talked their way inside, tied up the guards, and spent more than an hour cutting paintings from their frames. They made off with works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, Manet, and others, including Rembrandt's only known seascape and Vermeer's The Concert, one of the artist's rarest paintings. The stolen art has never been recovered, and it remains the largest unsolved art theft in history.

Because Gardner's will forbids rearranging the collection, the museum did something quietly powerful: it left the empty frames hanging on the walls where the paintings once were. Those bare frames are now among the most moving things in the building, a standing reminder of what is missing and an open invitation for the works to come home.

The galleries are arranged as a sequence of rooms, each with its own character, from the airy Spanish Cloister and its dramatic Sargent painting of a flamenco dancer to jewel-box chambers dense with Old Masters, textiles, and furniture. Part of the pleasure is discovery, since the labeling is deliberately sparse and you are meant to wander and look.

In more recent years a modern glass wing designed by the architect Renzo Piano was added alongside the old palace, holding the entrance, a concert hall, space for changing exhibitions, and a greenhouse. Music has always been part of the museum's life, and the concert programs continue a tradition that Gardner began, so a visit can end with a performance as easily as a painting.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.