Night at the Museum

review by Tammy Nguyen

            Fear, curiosity, and admiration go hand in hand when you visit the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum. Enclosed in this large mansion turned museum are more than 2,500 paintings, sculptures, furniture, books, letters, photographs and much more. In 1903, after three decades spent traveling the world collecting art, Mrs. Gardner decided to build a place where she could house all of the priceless artwork she possessed.

            Isabella Stewart Gardner was born in 1840 to David Stewart and Adelia Smith.  Her father made his hefty fortune trading linen and investing in mining. She married John “Jack” Lowell Gardner. They travelled a lot throughout their lives. Together, they immersed themselves in the European culture. Mrs. Gardner died in 1924, only 21 years after her museum opened, and in her will left a $1 million endowment and instructions that no placements of any piece of art be altered.

            Walking through this museum incites many emotions. The first thing you see is the beautiful, luscious indoor courtyard that Mrs. Gardner had built when she first obtained the property. It is center to the museum, and extends all the way up to the fourth floor with a massive skylight on top. The garden is filled with flowers of all kinds and colors and sculptures of Persephone, a headless Pelophoros, Odysseus, and a Maenad. It is a space filled with light and natural life, something that is incredibly unique in Boston.

Then, you walk to your left and El Jaleo, a dark toned painting by John Singer Sargent depicting a Spanish Gypsy dancer and musicians, hang prominently at the end of the Spanish Cloister. This is one of the many spaces in this museum that shows Mrs. Gardner’s brilliance when it comes to displaying art. She had left the floor around the painting concrete, displayed similar items that were in the painting next to it as an extension of the background and used a mirror to reflect the painting to bring it to life. The painting has its own spotlight, and it is mysterious and mesmerizing to look at.

            As you make your way up the stairs and into the different rooms, which are mostly dimly lit, you can see hundreds of artworks by many different artists with completely different styles. The furniture is spaced out and the walls are covered in elegant wallpaper or red velvet.

            There is a room in the museum that was not open to the public when the museum was first opened; it was Mrs. Gardner’s private space. There is a six feet tall oil paint portrait in there of her done by John Singer Sargent. It is a painting that you will not be able to stop staring at. In the painting, she’s in a low-cut velvet black dress, her waist wrapped in two strings of pearls, her arms bare, her mouth slightly open, her skin smoothly fair, her hair tied up – a look that was simply unacceptable in the 1800s. This is such an image of power in that no woman back then was courageous enough to be flaunting her jewelry and her body in such an open way that Mrs. Gardner did. In fact, the whole museum is an embodiment of elegance and power and the incredible passion and intuition that Isabella Stewart Gardner had as a woman in the 1800s