Isabella Stewart Gardner, painted by John Singer Sargent.

Our final day in Boston was the Monday after the wedding. We’d already done some major touristy stuff and were ready for a change. Plus, it was cold, windy, and raining – not a good day for outdoor activities.

I love art and I’ve been wanting to visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum for a long time. A rainy day made it a perfect time to explore indoors.

This may be the most eclectic and oddly presented collection of art in the country. Certainly, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The brainchild and passion project of Mrs. Isabella Stewart Gardner is an Italianate villa centered around a gorgeous and extensive atrium garden. A series of rooms on each of three levels contain mixtures of art work in various media and from a variety of periods, all arranged according to Mrs. Gardner’s sometimes quirky personal aesthetic.

A Medieval carved limestone altarpiece.

Although each room is named, the collection of objects it contains doesn’t generally fit completely inside the theme suggested. Though the walls of each room are hung with magnificent paintings, those may be a hodge-podge of styles and time periods. Works from some of the best-known masters of the past, including Titian, Raphael, Giotto, and Rembrandt, and some more modern giants of the art world like Anders Zorn and John Singer Sargeant, hang side by side with those by lesser known, though mostly very accomplished painters. And each room also features beautiful furniture, accessories, and sculptures, some dating back as far as Roman times.

Visiting it makes for a fascinating and brain-boggling experience. We mostly explored the highlights in this trip, the well-known masterpieces and works of better known artists. But it would take many more trips to really take in all the wonderful contents of the museum. I hope to get back some day for closer study.

Rembrandt, self-portrait

As a mystery writer, I had a secondary motivating interest in the museum. It was the site of one of the most brazen and devastating art heists of the twentieth century. Memorials of that robbery remain on display in the form of the empty frames that masterpieces by Rembrandt, Degas, and others were cut from. They’ve been left on the wall, partly because Gardner’s will stipulates that items in her museum cannot be rearranged, but also as a melancholy reminder of what was lost, and perhaps even a ray of hope that they may someday be returned.

A final irony: on the day we visited the Gardner museum, another, even more famous museum was the victim of a yet more brazen heist, when thieves stole some of France’s most prized jewels from the Louvre.