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[[File:Isabella-gardner.jpg|right|thumb|320px|Isabella Stewart Gardner, as seen in a portrait by John Singer Sargent]]

[[File:Isabella-gardner.jpg|right|thumb|320px|Isabella Stewart Gardner, as seen in a portrait by John Singer Sargent]]

Isabella Stewart Gardner was an art collector and a prominent figure in high society in Boston, New England, around the turn of the century. Through her friendship with [[Okakura Kakuzo|Okakura Kakuzô]] and others, she played a role in the introduction of Japanese art to New England, and to the United States as a whole. Before her death, she transformed her home at Fenway Court into a museum, arranged according to her liking; today, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is one of the most major museums in the city, and remains, in accordance with her will, arranged largely as she left it.

Isabella Stewart Gardner was an art collector and a prominent figure in high society in Boston, New England, around the turn of the century. Through her friendship with [[Okakura Kakuzo|Okakura Kakuzô]] and others, she played a role in the introduction of Japanese art to New England, and to the United States as a whole. Before her death, she transformed her home at Fenway Court into a museum, arranged according to her liking; today, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is one of the most major museums in the city, and remains, in accordance with her will, arranged largely as she left it.

She and her husband, Jack Gardner, visited Kyoto in [[1883]], and may have stayed at the temple [[Chion-in]].

 

She and her husband visited Kyoto in [[1883]], and may have stayed at the temple [[Chion-in]]. In [[1891]], Isabella's father left her his fortune. With the help of Italian Renaissance expert Bernard Berenson and others, Mrs. Gardner acquired a large collection of European and Asian art. Following her husband's death in [[1898]], she then bought a plot of land in Boston's Fenway and began to have a house built to house the collection. Fenway Court, as she called the house, was completed in [[1903]], and it quickly became a major center of cultural activity, as Mrs. Gardner invited friends over for concerts, dinner parties, and the like.

Mrs. Gardner did not arrange objects in the house as most curators would a museum today; nothing is organized according to culture, period, or style, but rather according to her personal taste, juxtaposing works from different cultures and periods in order to suit a particular aesthetic sense. The collection includes a number of significant treasures: The Gardner's painting "The Rape of Europa" has been described as the greatest Titian work in a private US collection. The collection also includes sketches and drawings by Michelangelo. The museum is perhaps most (in)famous, however, as the site of the greatest still-unresolved art heist in American history; in a heist pulled off in the late 1990s, a pair of men stole a Rembrandt and a number of other priceless works which still have yet to be found today.

Mrs. Gardner did not arrange objects in the house as most curators would a museum today; nothing is organized according to culture, period, or style, but rather according to her personal taste, juxtaposing works from different cultures and periods in order to suit a particular aesthetic sense. The collection includes a number of significant treasures: The Gardner's painting "The Rape of Europa" has been described as the greatest Titian work in a private US collection. The collection also includes sketches and drawings by Michelangelo. The museum is perhaps most (in)famous, however, as the site of the greatest still-unresolved art heist in American history; in a heist pulled off in the late 1990s, a pair of men stole a Rembrandt and a number of other priceless works which still have yet to be found today.

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[[Category:Foreigners]]

[[Category:Foreigners]]

[[Category:Women]]

[[Category:Women]]

[[Category:Meiji Period]]

[[Category:Meiji Period]]