Gardner created much fodder for the gossip columns of the day, with her reputation for stylish tastes and unconventional behavior.

From age five to fifteen, she attended a nearby academy for girls, where she studied art, music, and dance, as well as French and Italian.

In 1857, she was taken to Italy, and in Milan, she saw Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli's collection of Renaissance art arranged in rooms designed to recall historical eras.

They married in Grace Church on April 10, 1860, and then lived in a house that Isabella's father gave them, at 152 Beacon Street in Boston.

Beginning in the late 1880s, they frequently traveled across America, Europe, and Asia to discover foreign cultures and expand their knowledge of art around the world.

Among the collectors with whom she competed was Edward Perry Warren, who supplied a number of works to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The Gardner collection includes works by some of Europe's most important artists, such as Botticelli's Madonna and Child with an Angel, Titian's Rape of Europa, Fra Angelico's Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin, and Diego Velázquez's King Philip IV of Spain.

While in Venice, Gardner bought art and antiques, attended the opera, and dined with expatriate artists and writers.

The eclectic gallery installations, paintings, sculpture, textiles, and furniture from different periods and cultures combine to create a rich, complex, and unique narrative.

It opened to the public, months later, with a variety of paintings, drawings, furniture and other objects dating from ancient Egypt to Matisse.

[13] In 1919, Isabella Gardner suffered the first of a series of strokes, and died five years later, on July 17, 1924, at the age of 84 in her living quarters on the fourth floor of her Museum.

[14] She is buried in the Gardner family tomb at Mount Auburn Cemetery, located in Watertown and Cambridge, between her husband and her son.

Her will created an endowment of $1 million and outlined stipulations for support of the museum, including that the permanent collection not be significantly altered.

In keeping with her philanthropic nature, her will also left sizable bequests to the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Industrial School for Crippled and Deformed Children, Animal Rescue League of Boston, and Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

[citation needed] A devout Anglo-Catholic, she requested, in her will, that the Society of St John the Evangelist (Cowley Fathers) celebrate an annual Memorial Requiem Mass for the repose of her soul in the museum chapel.

This duty is now performed each year on her birthday and alternates between the Society of St John the Evangelist and the Church of the Advent.