The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Empty Frames

A Palace of Art With Ghosts on the Walls

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on the Fenway is the most personal museum in America, and I mean that literally - the collection is displayed exactly as Isabella Stewart Gardner arranged it before her death in 1924, per the terms of her will, which specified that nothing could be moved, added, or sold. The result is a museum frozen in one woman's vision: a four-story Venetian palazzo built in the Fens of Boston, its central courtyard open to the sky and filled with flowering plants that change seasonally, its walls hung with Titians and Rembrandts and Sargents in arrangements that follow no chronological or art-historical logic but possess an internal coherence that is entirely Gardner's own.

I visited on a Tuesday in November - the museum offers free admission to anyone named Isabella, a policy I admire for its specificity and cannot personally exploit. The courtyard is the first thing you see, and it stops you. Three stories of arched windows rise around a garden of nasturtiums and ferns, and the light that pours through the glass roof is diffused and warm and gives the entire space the atmosphere of a greenhouse crossed with a cathedral. Gardner designed it to evoke a Venetian palazzo's central courtyard, and it works - you feel as if you have stepped out of Boston and into a building that has been standing on a canal for five hundred years.

The galleries are arranged around the courtyard on three floors, and each room is a small world. The Dutch Room contains Rembrandt's Self-Portrait, Aged 23, and a Vermeer - The Concert - that is not there. This is where the museum's most famous story lives. On March 18, 1990, two men disguised as police officers entered the museum and stole thirteen works of art, including the Vermeer, three Rembrandts, a Manet, and five Degas drawings. The works have never been recovered. The FBI maintains an active investigation. The museum has posted a 10-million-dollar reward.

And the empty frames remain on the walls.

This is the detail that defines the Gardner. Where the stolen works hung, the frames are still displayed, vacant, their absence a presence that fills the room more powerfully than any painting could. The empty frame where The Concert once hung is haunting - a dark rectangle of damask where a Vermeer should be, surrounded by works that still hang in their places, undisturbed, as if pretending their neighbor has merely stepped out for a moment and will return.

The third floor contains the chapel, a small room with a stained glass window and a ceiling painted with stars, and the Gothic Room, where a full-length Sargent portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner herself hangs - a woman in a black dress, pearls at her waist, her expression suggesting she knows something you do not and is not going to tell you. She looks, across the room, at a Giotto, a thirteenth-century painting of the presentation of the Christ child, and the dialogue between the two works - the Renaissance Madonna and the Gilded Age Madonna of the Fenway - feels intentional, which, knowing Gardner, it was.

The museum is open Wednesday through Monday. Go on a weekday morning. Stand in the Dutch Room and look at the empty frames. Let them work on you. The Gardner is a museum about collecting, about obsession, about one woman's refusal to compromise her vision, and about what remains when something beautiful is taken away. What remains, it turns out, is everything else, still standing, still magnificent, still exactly where she put it.