Asset Details
Do you wish to reserve the book?
Isabella Stewart Gardner: 'One of the Seven Wonders of Boston'
Hey, we have placed the reservation for you!
By the way, why not check out events that you can attend while you pick your title.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Looks like we were not able to place the reservation. Kindly try again later.
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
Isabella Stewart Gardner: 'One of the Seven Wonders of Boston'
Do you wish to request the book?
Isabella Stewart Gardner: 'One of the Seven Wonders of Boston'
Please be aware that the book you have requested cannot be checked out. If you would like to checkout this book, you can reserve another copy
We have requested the book for you!
Your request is successful and it will be processed during the Library working hours. Please check the status of your request in My Requests.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Looks like we were not able to place your request. Kindly try again later.
Journal Article
Isabella Stewart Gardner: 'One of the Seven Wonders of Boston'
2020
Overview
Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) was a firecracker of a woman with a studied yet eclectic taste in art and the means to acquire lots of it. At twenty-seven, after losing her nearly three-year-old son to pneumonia and another child to miscarriage, her husband, John Lowell “Jack” Gardner, planned a getaway to help relieve their grief. Isabella relished the travel. Doctors had warned her against another pregnancy. She soon gave up thoughts of having children and embraced the life of cosmopolitan heiress, traveling Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, and the Middle East; collecting paintings, sculptures, tapestries, photographs, ceramics, and a wide variety of artifacts.2Befriending many of the most renowned artists of the day, including the painters James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, Isabella steadily built her collection. As it grew, she and her husband formed plans for a new home with space enough to display all of it, but, in 1891, he died suddenly at the age of sixty-one. Isabella refused to be stultified by despair. She bought land in the marshy Back Bay Fens area of Boston, alongside part of the “Emerald Necklace” park system designed by Frederick Law Olmstead—and began hashing out ideas for her new home and gallery.
