Isabella Stewart Gardner

Isabella Stewart Gardner called Mrs. Jack Gardner ( born April 14, 1840 in New York City, New York, † July 14, 1924 in Boston, Massachusetts) was an influential American art collector, philanthropist and patron. She is the founder of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. Gardner was a sponsor of the epochal Armory Show 1913.

The daughter of David and Adelia (Smith) Stewart married at the age of 20 years, the rich Boston shipowners and financial investor John Lowell Gardner ( 1837-1898 ), known as Jack (and they "Mrs. Jack ").

Jack and Isabella had a son, John Lowell III, who died at the age of less than two years in March 1865. After that, the couple devoted primarily to the travel and the arts, from 1875, however, also the three orphaned teenage sons of Jack's brother Joseph.

Isabella was regarded as extremely dynamic, eccentric personality, which employed the gossip columns of the Boston newspapers. To her friends were John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Anders Zorn, Henry James, Okakura Kakuzo and Francis Marion Crawford.