Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum - Boston, Massachusetts

Address:280 The Fenway
Boston, Massachusetts
Tel: (617) 566-1401

In 1903, in New York on the opening night of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum guests listened to the music of Bach, Mozart, and Schumann, while gazing in wonder at a courtyard full of flowers, enjoying one of America's finest collections of art. Today, you can expect this same wonderful elegance.

The museum is a stunning 15th-century Venetian-style palace with three floors of galleries surrounding a beautiful flower-filled courtyard that blooms year round. Containing over 2500 paintings, sculptures, tapestries, furniture, manuscripts, rare books and decorative arts spanning thirty centuries of history, visitors will delight at the magnificent works of Titian, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Manet, Degas, Whistler and Sargent, just to name a few.

The permanent collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is particularly rich in Italian Renaissance paintings. The first Matisse to enter an American collection is housed here, and the archives hold more than 7,000 letters and 1,000 correspondents including the most famous Henry Adams, T.S. Eliot, Sarah Bernhardt and Oliver Wendell Holmes, in addition to original Dante manuscripts.

A lovely contemporary art gallery is also on display at the museum. Visual artists, musicians, photographers, composers, dancers, storytellers, filmmakers, writers and others, present a most unique heritage to create a vibrant and creative display of artistic innovations.

Temporary exhibitions are also showcased such as a fascinating display from Cliff Evans works. Evans treats images like found objects, mined from the vast reference library that is today's Internet. His exhibition Empyrean is a digital polyptych with photomontage animation which recalls the form of 15th-century Northern European altar-pieces merged with contemporary advertising narratives.

Visitors to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum will love the Gardner Café where lunch is served in the garden in the summer months. Great dishes await you to complete this surreal experience. .

To access the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, take the Green Line E train outbound, or No. 39 bus to the Museum of Fine Arts stop. Cross Huntington Avenue onto Louis Prang Street and Walk two blocks. The Museum is on the left.

Isabella Stewart Gardner first welcomed visitors to her museum on New Year's Day, 1903. On that evening guests listened to the music of Bach, Mozart, and Schumann, gazed in wonder at the courtyard full of flowers, and viewed one of the nation's finest collections of art. Today, visitors experience much the same thing. The Gardner Museum has remained essentially unchanged since its founder's death in 1924. Unchanged but certainly not stagnant. Three floors of galleries surround a garden courtyard blooming with life in all seasons.