Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

A Reasoning Game

by Angel Xie

Visiting the Gardner museum was like playing a reasoning game with Mrs. Gardner who isn’t alive in nowadays. She was smart and was a careful thinker. The Gardner museum remained the same as Mrs. Gardner was alive as she required the director of the museum to do. She arranged everything in the museum herself. Every detail that you could notice in the museum, from the furniture to the artwork, from the layout and the position of every single piece, is a hint than she left for you to get to know her-her psersonality, her habits and her daily life etc. The visitors inevitably became patient and circumspect detectives to find out the interesting truth about Mrs. Gardner.

 One of the most representative rooms was a room called Gothic room. It had a mysterious and religious atmosphere. The main material in the room was dark wood, which made everything in the room solemn. There was a lot of antiques in the room, such as an old dictionary that was covered by dirt. There was also some black statues of religious figures and beautiful stained glasses. The lights in the room weren’t bright enough to see everything clearly yet when you were in the room you would enjoy the faintness and breath of nostalgia. 

You could see a portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner, as mysterious as everything elso in the room. The portrait itself was mainly black because Mrs. Gardner’s dress was black. It was hard to distinguish the bottom from the background because the colors were nearly the same. It reminded you of Gods in the legends who were usually partly hidden and partly visible.  This reflected that Mrs. Gardner probably regarded herself suprior than normal people and she was an mysterious person.

            Another interesting thing about that portrait was that Mrs. Gardner’s face on the portrait had been re-rendered eight times until she was satisfied yet her facial expression was really plain. By knowing that fact, you may suppose many different reasons for that. Maybe she didn’t want her facial expression to mislead people’s  understanding to her personality. Maybe she wanted to make people curious about what was under her face. It really didn’t matter your guessing is a right one or not because the process of being an detective was an enjoyable one.

The Gardner museum was a place that people could communicate with Mrs. Gardner because when you were studying all the things in the museum, you were actually studying her. And possibly, people who were prudent enough could dig out some secrets of her when playing the reasoning game with her.