The Isabella Stuart Gardner Collection in Boston

This lecture focuses on the life and legacy of Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) through a closer look at her collecting practices of Old Masters as well as support during her lifetime of the artists and performers that were her contemporaries. Retracing her biography, and especially her travels abroad to Italy, this presentation will review the important connections that she made not only with then-budding art historian and dealer Bernard Berenson but also various other ex-pat figures – such as artists John Singer Sargent and James McNeil Whistler as well as artist-writer John Ruskin, with whom she spent time in Venice, the city that inspired the gorgeous palazzo that she commissioned from William Sears on the land that she purchased in 1899 following her husband's untimely death.

In addition to exploring Isabella's life, this talk will zero in on several specific prized Italian paintings still in the collection today while also considering those lost in the greatest art theft in history – a heist that left the Gardner Collection without thirteen of its greatest works. Finally, this presentation will briefly introduce a couple of the more recent interventions by contemporary artists who have engaged with objects in the collection’s history to produce new and compelling art that further extends the legacy of this unique collector and her museum.