Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Fenway, Boston, United States
The Gardner rewards a slower kind of museum visit. Paintings, furniture and objects remain woven into an intensely personal collection, arranged around a lush courtyard rather than separated into a conventional sequence of white galleries. The Venetian-inspired palace supplies as much atmosphere as the artworks, making this an unusually intimate encounter with a collector’s imagination. Allow room to look closely and revisit a favourite gallery, instead of trying to tick off every celebrated work.