Stolen Beauty

It’s impossible to visit the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum without thinking about the infamous 1990 art heist.

Isabella Stuart Gardner was a wealthy Boston socialite, philanthropist, and patron of the arts. She began collecting art in the early 1890s, using money she inherited from her father after his death.

Isabella traveled extensively throughout Europe scooping up Vermeers and Botticellis like Taylor Swift on a Grammy pocketing spree. I have always thought that if I had obscene or even modestly gross wealth I would put some of that toward purchasing art. A Hopper in the hopper? C’mon! That cocktail party banter writes itself!

Isabella married John Gardner, a successful Boston businessman and brother of a close friend, in 1860. Together the pair embarked on excursions all over the world, amassing art as well as other precious artifacts such as furniture, ceramics, tapestries, rare manuscripts, and even architectural elements such as ornately carved doors and stunning stained glass windows. By 1896 the Gardners realized they had the enormously happy problem of having too much beautiful stuff and not enough room to house it. I can absolutely relate. It’s only a matter of time before I am forced to break ground on a library simply to hold my overflowing collection of the complete Sweet Valley High series. Isabella and John began making plans for a museum space that would allow them to both house their growing collection and make it available to be enjoyed by the public. Unfortunately, John Gardner passed away in 1898, which only hastened Isabella to realize their shared vision. She spent the next five years meticulously overseeing every aspect of the future museum—from working closely with the architect, Willard T. Sears, on the overall design, to selecting building materials from all over the world, and even participating in aspects of the museum’s construction.  

The Isabella Stuart Gardner museum opened to the public in 1903. Throughout the remainder of Isabella’s life, she made it a space not just to show art, but to support the flourishing creative scene in Boston. She regularly hosted musicians, writers, as well as artists in the museum space, and she was renowned as a powerful patron and beloved philanthropist. Isabella was also a teeny bit of a rabble rouser in her day. She had an eccentric style and was fond of, as we still say, “mixing it up” in public. One of her more scandalous turns involved showing up at the ultra-refined Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1912 wearing a white headband emblazoned with the phrase “Oh, you Red Sox,” which evidently nearly caused a riot at the time. And thus the legacy of Sox fans being complete jerks was born. Isabella, you minx!

The crown jewel, in my opinion, of the Gardner is its grand Courtyard, a glass-covered garden courtyard that sits at the center of the museum space. The Gardners spent many happy times in Venice, Italy, a particularly favorite destination for Isabella. The Courtyard brings Italy to Boston with its Venetian Gothic Revival architecture popularized in America in the late-nineteenth century. Four stories of balconies and arched windows overlook the Courtyard populated with sculptures and mosaics, making the visitor feel as if they’ve just wandered onto the grounds of a tranquil Italian estate. The Courtyard is also a lush green space; it’s alive with trees, grass, and seasonal varieties of flowering plants.  

A team of horticulturists rotate blooms throughout the year. No matter when you step foot inside, you’ll be greeted by something vibrant and verdant. “Oh that’s nice,” you might be thinking, but believe me, getting to stand in a warm, peaceful space surrounded by blossoming flowers and robust, leafy things in the bleak depths of February suddenly seems less “nice touch, Isabella” and more “who do I need to talk to about, like, living here?”

I was at the museum specifically to take in its most spectacular spring event: the hanging nasturtiums. For years, Isabella grew nasturtiums in her greenhouse out in Brookline, Massachusetts. The cheerful orange blossoms were her favorite flower, opening in time for her birthday, April 14. She began having them “installed” in the Courtyard as early as 1904 and the showstopping tradition has continued since.

The Gardner Courtyard. I live here now. ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

Spilling out from the third floor Venetian windows, the 20-foot-long, leggy green vines dangle down the side of the stone balconies, tickling the edges of the stucco walls. Tangerine-colored nasturtiums nestle together in the green thicket, looking delicious enough to lick. Though that impulse is frowned upon.  

The growing process takes all year, but the nasturtiums are only viable for about two weeks after they fully bloom. If you want to see them in person you have to hustle or it’s “better luck next year, pal.” That might sound harsh, but this is Boston. You can go into labor on a subway car that just caught fire and still be expected to show up with the office’s morning Dunk’s order. We are not coddlers. We do not cater. Try Boise.

I will name her Rapunzel. ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

Floral art at its finest. ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

I hadn’t been to the Gardner in probably ten years. I forgot how homey the space is with its boxy rooms full of furniture and tapestries and books. You almost expect Isabella to appear at your elbow and invite you to stay for lunch. Maybe it’s the feeling of having such a “lived in” place of so much joy and animation violated that makes what happened on the night of March 18, 1990 additionally chilling. Thieves stole more than art; they robbed beauty and inspiration and pleasure.

In those midnight hours just after St. Patrick’s Day, thirteen works of art were stolen from the Gardner. Two men posing as police officers showed up at the museum claiming to have responded to an alarm. The security guards admitted them. “This is a robbery,” the thieves reportedly said (no monologuing for these villains) before tying up the guards and getting on with the business at hand.

For nearly an hour and a half (!) the men roamed around the museum. Several of the works they stole were quite large. The empty frames of two of those pieces remain on the walls of the gallery they once presided over, forlorn and haunting. I stood in front of them, paying my respects. Each is probably at least 6-feet tall, their frames are thick and unwieldy, the wood ornately carved, extremely heavy. Even one tall person would need a ladder, right? Experts studying the case noted that there were far more valuable works in the museum that went undisturbed. And in addition to artwork, it appears that a worthless eagle finial was taken as well as a Chinese vase of nominal value. Had the thieves taken what they assumed were pricey enough and then, what, sort of leisurely heisted about? Did one guy give the vase to his girlfriend as one of those “Sorry I forgot your birthday, Denise. I got a good deal on it from a buddy of mine.” All of it seems so low-rent and casual and the motive soupy at best; the entire affair reads like someone’s first draft of a caper novel.

To this day, the crime remains unsolved. In 2021 Netflix released an excellent documentary titled This is a Robbery detailing the heist and its aftermath. It’s a fascinating wormhole of speculation including bits about ties to organized crime and supposed sightings of pieces as far north as Maine and far south as Pennsylvania. Wild fabrication or not, if I’m driving around Bangor and pass a sign for an estate or barn sale, I’m making a U-turn and pulling up my list of “stolen Gardner art” on my Notes app.

I drifted through the museum a few times. It’s manageable enough that you can take it all in and then circle back to visit rooms or pieces that you want to have a closer look at. I kept lingering in front of those empty frames. They hang on one of the back walls of what’s called The Dutch Room. If they were in their rightful places, the paintings would face the carved windows overlooking the Courtyard. Right now, their view is partially obscured by a curtain of orange blossoms that seem to softly drift in suspended animation. And so for a few weeks at least, I like to think that a little of that stolen beauty has been recovered.  

Beautiful sentinels. ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

*To learn more about the incredible nasturtium growing process, click HERE.

*To learn more about the design and materials of the courtyard, click HERE.