The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has welcomed visitors since its opening in 1903. Isabella Stewart Gardner believed that works of art should be displayed in a setting that would fire the imagination. Accordingly, she designed “Fenway Court” in the style of a Venetian palace, organizing a series of intimate rooms around a light-filled interior courtyard. Although Mrs. Gardner arranged some of the galleries by period, much of the collection is displayed in more personal, visually stimulating ways that mix objects from different cultures and periods. To encourage visitors to respond directly to the visual qualities of the works themselves, she left most of the objects unlabeled. Many of today’s visitors enjoy the personal aesthetic contemplation this affords, while others prefer to explore the galleries with an audio tour or a guide to the collection.

Particularly rich in Italian Renaissance works, the Gardner Museum’s collection includes paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles, decorative arts, prints and drawings, rare books, photographs, and correspondence. Isabella Stewart Gardner lived on the fourth floor of the Museum and added to the collection until her death in 1924. In accordance with her will, the objects in the galleries remain as she arranged them, lending a strong sense of her personal character to the Museum’s environment.

The Museum continues its founder’s commitment to supporting the work of artists and performers, as well as her encouragement of dynamic dialogue about art. While the galleries themselves are unchanging, individual objects in the collection are constantly reinterpreted through the work of artists and scholars in the Artist-in-Residence Program and the Eye of the Beholder lecture series. A new gallery located on the first floor of the Museum offers changing special exhibitions that highlight objects from the permanent collection or contemporary works created by Gardner Artists-in-Residence.