A Museum, but Also a Story by Ryan LaPointe

           The Isabella Stewart Garner Museum is an elegant museum with a long, interesting history.  Situated just off Huntington Ave in Boston, the museum was established and curated by its namesake, Isabella Stewart Gardner.  Gardner filled the museum with her personal art collection, which encompassed a variety of art forms and styles.  Now long deceased, Gardner lived an exuberant life filled with travel and adventure.  Her love for Venice and the Italian Culture served as a source of inspiration for the design of her museum.

Upon her death, Gardner's will instituted an endowment of $1 million, and forbid any significant alteration of her museum's permanent collection.  Because of this provision, the pieces found in the museum have been neither changed nor rearranged, to the fullest extent possible, since Gardner's death.  Gardner never left any explanations concerning the locations of the various pieces in the museum, and the museum staffers are left to speculate about the reasoning behind her choices.

The courtyard is a small but beautiful garden full of lush greenery and stone statues, with pebble paths that turn at right angles and an ornate tile mosaic floor in the center of it all. Located directly in the center of the building, the courtyard serves as the center piece of the whole museum.  It is surrounded by orange-tinted stone walls reaching up through all four floors of the building.  On these walls are many exquisite stone balconies that allow viewing the courtyard from a variety of angles.  No matter where you are in the museum, chances are you don't have to walk far to find a view of the courtyard.

As with the rest of the museum, it is clear that Gardner put a lot of thought into the courtyard.  At the center of the Mosaic floor, you can see a depiction of Medusa, a monster of Greek mythology whose gaze turned people into stone.  It is fitting, then, that Gardner placed this icon at the center of a garden full of stone statues.

The sunlight that enters from the skylight above the courtyard permeates much of the museum.  The ambient light in the museum noticeably brightens and dims as the sun is unobstructed or blocked by clouds.  This ambient sunlight gives many of the rooms of the museum a warm, natural feeling.

Overall, I found my visit to the museum to be a very pleasant, intriguing experience.  I found the artwork to be interesting, but I was more intrigued by the story behind the museum.  I would definitely recommend this museum, both to lovers of art and to those simply looking to have a calm interesting afternoon.