Of ends and means in building a great museum

The famed courtyard of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, built in 1896-1903 in Boston’s Fenway section, financed and directed by Mrs. Gardner (1840-1924), a very rich arts collector and patron originally from New York who married a Boston Brahmin, Jack Gardner. The museum, unfortunately, may be most famous as the site of the world’s greatest art theft, in 1990. They’re still looking for the hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen paintings.

“The imagination of Isabella Stewart Gardner yielded a remarkable achievement in the museum to which she gave her name and treasure. But it is an achievement easily overlooked. Because she was rich and famous, we are too willing to gape at her legacy, with dollar signs in mind. And because she was eccentric, there also is scarcely any story we will not credit, however much it sensationalizes and trivializes her. We seem relentlessly more interested in her means than in her ends. It is a losing battle, perhaps, for a historian to try to set the record straight.”

— Douglass Shand-Tucci (1941-2018), Boston architectural historian and author of a 1997 biography of Mrs. Gardner, The Art of the Scandal, in a 1990 Boston Globe interview.