Isabella Stewart Gardner museum
At the end of September my mum and I went on a holiday to the US on a tour of New England’s fall colours. We were primarily on an outdoorsy holiday - visiting the mountains of New Hampshire and farms of Vermont, but we did manage to fit in a couple of museums and historic buildings along the way. I’ll try and write some posts about these over the next few months.
The first to tell you about was one of the highlights of our trip- visiting the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
Before we started our New England tour we spent a few days in Boston. Now, I’ve actually spent quite a bit of time in Boston. In my 20’s I spent three summers working at a summer camp in Maine, flying in and out of Boston Logan Airport, and had plenty of time off to explore the city. During these visits I had walked the Freedom Trail, been to the Old State House, the common and gardens, visited the Science Museum, been on a boat tour of the harbour, and even been out on a day trip to Salem. So when my Mum suggested we spend a couple of extra days there at the start of out trip, I was keenly scouring guide books and internet guides for new things we could investigate.
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was somewhere that kept coming up in recommendations as a must-see venue, so we added it to our itinerary. The museum is the life’s work of Isabella Stewart Gardner and was designed to showcase the thousands of objects she had collected. Inspired by personal travels, the passions of her friends and her studies at Harvard, the collection is wide-ranging and eclectic.
In many ways it is an unusual museum - most things are not behind glass, set out in room scenes in themed galleries. A mix of contemporary art (often by friends of Isabella) and historic artefacts, she was clearly interested in everything and happy to have a mix of styles, genres and periods co-mingling. A gallery featuring the likes of John Singer Sargent, who was the museums first artist in residence, and James Whistler, sits next to a cloister covered in ceramic tiles made by indigenous Mexican craftspeople. I particularly liked the textiles which were scattered around, sometimes hanging, sometimes in box-cases, sometimes hidden in passageways or behind doors. Lace with inlaid portraits and delicate animal motifs, hand stitched heraldic emblems and huge tapestries that covered whole walls.
But it’s not really the objects themselves that are the main feature of this museum. The thing that sets it apart is the central courtyard, which is set in the middle of the museum and is visible from all rooms. It’s a covered space filled with tropical plants, statues and amazing coloured flowers. They are a seasonal display which is grown at an offsite nursery and then brought in and swapped out weekly to keep the garden at peak condition. From the ground floor it is magical, multiple archways line the square of the courtyard, and then as you ascend through the floors and circle around the galleries you get a myriad of different views down onto the greenery. Every window and archway framing the statues and plants in new ways.
Three views of the courtyard, from the ground floor, an upstairs gallery and glimpsed through the stairwell.
The main thing I remember about the visit was the unique atmosphere it exuded, unlike any museum I’ve visited before. It was partly the awe of seeing the courtyard from different angles, but it also had a strange sense of space, with vast galleries that felt very empty and cavernous, and also cramped tiny spaces, filled to the brim, where every object and painting jostled for space. It’s a very special place to just exist in.
If you are ever in Boston and want to visit a fascinating museum, this is one I’d highly recommend. But if you can’t make it in person there is a fantastic website where you can explore the collection digitally.
Snippets from my visit.