What Isabella Wanted: Isabella Stewart Gardner Builds a Museum

This account follows Isabella Stewart Gardner as she builds the art collection that became Boston’s Gardner Museum. It describes her broad, eclectic tastes, her wealth and privilege, and the ways she acquired art, including methods of questionable ethics during a period when countries were restricting the export of cultural treasures. Gardner displayed the collection in a mansion built as a museum, arranging it according to her own vision while living on the top floor. When she died in 1924, she left it to the public with the condition that nothing be rearranged.