Modeled after a 15th-century Venetian palazzo, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum houses one of the most remarkable and eclectic art collections in the world. Isabella Stewart Gardner spent decades collecting art from her travels with her husband, John (“Jack”) Gardner, amassing a collection of more than 2,500 European, Asian, and American-influenced paintings, sculptures, tapestries, and decorative arts, spanning from antiquity to the 1920s.
Wishing to exhibit the treasures, she built and opened her museum in 1903 and during Gardner’s lifetime, she welcomed artists, performers, and scholars to draw inspiration from the rich collection and dazzling Venetian setting, including leading portrait painter John Singer Sargent, a frequent guest of The Copley Plaza (our hotel name at the time). Gardner was a well-known patron of Sargent and they were frequently spotted dining in our Oval Ballroom.