Located in Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is hailed as one of the earliest, most successful and characteristic museums in the United States. The first group of visitors arrived on New Year's Day in 1903. At the time of the opening, a total of 2,500 major works were collected including Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Giotto, and Rembrandt. The exhibition hall is decorated as the Venetian Renaissance style and full of green plants in the center garden.
Recommended by many of my friends, I discovered the multicultural beauty. It is a museum combines the paintings of the European heavyweight artists Sandro Botticelli and Henri Matisse, and the Japanese Edo-period screens, as well as the sculptures from China in the eleventh century. The amazing artistic diversity shows that the lady who founded this set of collection and designed such an antique museum was cool in the missing piece.
Walking through the darkened gallery, the sun shines through the glass top into the central garden of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (the design of glass roof in the garden was the first case in the United States) where flowers bloom and green leaves accompany. The type of plants would be varied every season. More interestingly, the museum has a long-standing ticket policy. At Isabella’s will dictates, any Guests wearing shirts of the Boston Red Sox can enjoy the discounts, and any guests named "Isabella" can enter the museum for free. As a college student, I got the discounted ticket priced $5.
After the two-hour tour around three floors in the building, my favorite masterpiece was a portrait of Isabella by John Singer Sargent with the name of El Jaleo. I was attracted to the first sight of it. The well-proportioned classicism decorated with imply of mystery composition. The dancing lady reflects a quote in the letter written by Sargent to Isabella when she was attacked by the social rumor: Alive and kicking. I was so into this quote and bought a necklace with the words on it.
The most attractive part of Isabella Museum is that it is small but complete, refined and exquisite. All of the artworks are aesthetically pleasing and placed in right order compared to the dizzying gluttony of a large museum. In a few hours, visitors can cognize Isabella’s small world and admire the charm. As her friend, Henry James predicted in his letter to Isabella in 1880, “My dear Mrs. Gardner, if you ‘like being remembered,’ it is a satisfaction you must be in the constant enjoyment of—so indelible is the image which you imprint on the consciousness of your fellow-men.”
