Isabella Gardner Museum

March 5, 2014

Isabella Gardner Museum

by Dariya Apsenbetova

As you walk inside the museum a blossoming garden comes into view. The garden is beautiful, decorated with plants, flowers, sculptures and art pieces carefully arranged to accent or hide among the plants. The benches that surround the garden build the romantic atmosphere where you can look at nature, and also see the walls that are around it. The museum itself has three floors and each room is designed in its own style, which is very different from each other. Each room has its own style, theme and paintings that also build the different atmosphere and hold its own history or purpose. The visitor can walk and learn the art in different ways or perspectives, and then put them all in one idea. In fact, this museum was a house where Isabella lived, and right before her death she turned her house into the museum with all her works that she had been collecting. The style of the house tells a lot about its owner.

First thing is that the museum includes a lot of works from different nations and cultures. There are various pieces from the ancient Greece and Rome. Also, you can find drawings and sculptures from Europe, Egypt, Japan and China during the Renaissance Era. Furthermore, you can notice that near each painting there is some furniture as decorations, which provides more details about the picture.

            Another thing that really amused me about the museum are the empty frames on the walls. They stand there as a reminder of a robbery in 1990, which the work was never recovered. In the second building, on the second floor, there is gallery that devoted to this event and it is called “The Last Seen.” There are photos of people and near their descriptions of their memories about the lost paintings. This museum left a big impression for me and I think this is what every person should experience, and take a look on ancient history and art in Mrs. Gardner’s museum.