The collection, by the late 1890s, was substantial enough that Gardner decided it needed a permanent home. After her husband John died in 1898, she bought land in the Fenway area of Boston—then recently drained marshland, now one of the city’s defining cultural corridors—and hired architect Willard T. Sears to build what would become Fenway Court.
The building was modeled on the Venetian Renaissance palaces that Gardner had studied and loved during her Italian travels. It was not imported from Venice—a persistent misconception—but built new in Boston with materials and architectural elements she had collected. The design included a central courtyard, open to the sky, filled with plants and flowers throughout the year. Galleries of varying sizes surrounded it on multiple levels, each arranged according to Gardner’s own aesthetic logic rather than chronological or national convention.
She was involved in every aspect of the arrangement. The collection mixed ancient Roman mosaics with Dutch masters and Spanish altarpieces in combinations that were deliberately eclectic, meant to create an experience of beauty rather than an art-historical survey. She worked on the installation for approximately a year. The museum opened to the public on January 1, 1903.
When Isabella Stewart Gardner died in 1924, her will established an endowment and specified that the collection be permanently exhibited for the education and enjoyment of the public, in accordance with her aesthetic vision and intent. The will’s provisions had a practical consequence that would matter enormously after 1990: the arrangement of the collection, as she had left it, was to remain unchanged. Works could not be sold or permanently moved. If the terms were violated, the collection would pass to Harvard University.