Consider: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Not only a great museum, but a crime scene too!
Thanks to Considered readers Rami and Lama for suggesting this week’s topic.
Most major museums throughout the world are huge public institutions: the Met, the Louvre, the Victoria and Albert, etc. Perhaps more interesting to consider are the small minority of museums that are private (either owned by foundations or businesses), representing or seeded with the collections of a single person. The most fun thing about these museums, aside from getting to explore someone’s personal collection, is that they can be great sources of drama and intrigue. Read on to learn about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, MA; the site of the largest unsolved theft in world history.
History
Isabella Stewart was born to a wealthy New York family in 1840. Through a classmate in Paris, she was introduced to her eventual husband, Jack Gardner.
In an effort to rouse Isabella from a depression caused by the loss of their first child to pneumonia at age 2, doctors recommended the Gardners begin to travel. In 1884, Isabella and Jack first visited the Palazzo Barbaro, a Venetian palace owned by fellow Bostonians, Daniel and Ariana Curtis.
The Curtises, who moved to Venice in 1880, are descendants of colonialists who came over on the Mayflower. They bought the incredible Venetian palace in 1885 (after renting it for four years), which featured frescos so beautiful that they were removed and placed in the Met. They operated the palace like a high-end Airbnb, often renting it to other wealthy Americans. Gardner was a frequent guest of the Palazzo. She even had her portrait painted by John Singer Sargent, a cousin of the Curtises, while on one of her stays. Other frequent guests included Edith Wharton, Claude Monet, Henry James, James McNeil Whistler (the world’s most famous mamma’s boy) and the poet Robert Browning.
The Curtis family still owns the Palazzo but it is no longer available to rent. You can visit it every few years when it is in use as a host site for the Venice Biennale. When it came time to start building her museum in 1880, Gardner modelled it after their Venetian Palazzo.
Design
After her father died in 1891, Gardner began collecting in earnest. She was the first American to own a painting by a Renaissance master (Boticelli). Her husband, James, had been on the board of the Boston Museum of Fine Art and involved in the museum’s move to a centrally planned park by the only landscape designer we know by name, Frederick Law Olmstead. Once her husband passed away, Gardner bought a plot of land near the future location of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and began to design and build her museum. She had her hand in every design decision and was a daily presence at the job site. When ceiling beams arrived for the Gothic Room and were too smooth for her liking, she took an axe and hacked away at them to create her desired patina. She spent a year determining the right location for every piece of art in her collection. Until her death in 1924, she continued to buy art and move paintings around the museum and she even moved into the museum’s fourth floor towards the end of her life.
In a move that I greatly admire, she opened the museum with a reception that included champagne and donuts. Her influence can still be found in the museum to this day. The objects in the museum remain hung the way she wanted over a 100 years ago. Where the stolen paintings once were, now hang empty frames to remain true to the vision. In the bequest, the museum is limited in how it can sell any art that was donated by Gardner.
The Theft
On St. Patrick's Day 1990 (debauchery on St. Patty’s day… big surprise), two men dressed as police officers entered the museum, tied up the watchmen, and spent two hours cutting paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and others out of their frames. The total appraised value of the paintings was $500M and they didn’t even steal the museum’s most expensive works!
Despite a $10M reward, the works have been missing for over 30 years. Netflix made a documentary on the heist called: This is a Robbery. The case has a number of twists and turns, but the general belief was it was perpetrated by an organized crime syndicate. Two of the believed ring leaders, Bobby Gentile and Bobby Guarente, have recently passed away leading to hopes that someone might come forward. The FBI went so far as to send an informant to spy on Gentile at an Italian red sauce restaurant that he operated out of a used car business he owned. Unfortunately, I was not able to find pictures or a menu.
The only other used car lot/Italian restaurant I could find was Louie’s in Allentown, PA. Louie’s closed when its owner, former Allentown mayoral candidate Louis Belletieri (pizza hall of famer!), was charged with 31 felony theft counts. Sounds like it was delicious, though.
Gentile’s cousin, Sammy Mozzicato (an FBI informant), alleges that Gentile tried to sell him the paintings for $500K each. Mozzicato also alleges that Gentile kept a Napoleonic bronze eagle finial, which was stolen from the museum, in his auto body shop/restaurant for years.
Cost
Cost of entry to the museum is $20 for adults. If you are a member of your local art museum you might have reciprocal admission privileges, which means free entry. Gardner was a big Red Sox fan, so for a time visitors wearing red paraphernalia got discounted admission. When I spoke to the museum this week they informed me that, sadly, they have ended that promotion. But, if you are named Isabella you get free admission for life.
PS
Another of the largest heists in history was the Antwerp Diamond Heist. For a period of 18 months, a heist crew composed of Speedy, Monster, the Genius and the King of Keys pretended to be Italian diamond merchants while they cased the vault. Over a number of hours, they broke into 123 of the 160 safety deposit boxes and stole over $100M in diamonds and jewellery. Later on, while disposing of the evidence, Speedy suffered a panic attack. A hunter came across the pile days later and his discovery led to the arrest of Notarbartolo, the ringleader - the only arrest in the case. So far authorities have recovered less than $20M of the “loot.”
If you’re new to Considered (welcome!), and are here for the art, may I suggest our past posts on Ritter Chocolate, which features the interesting Ritter Museum (dedicated to square art) or our article on Naoshima Art Islands in Japan.
i’ve never been to a museum quite that eclectic and personal, but I very much enjoyed the Picasso museum in Paris as well as the Gustave Moreau museum, both dedicated to a single artist.
In the case of the Moreau museum, he painted very large canvases, and a lot of them. After his death, they turned his house into a museum, And they pretty much covered every inch of the walls they could. It’s incredible. Plus his artwork is astoundingly detailed, oil with ink detailing. It doesn’t reproduce very well in photographs because of the level of detail required.