The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is typically understood as an unusual aesthetic structure specific to American fine art and collecting. Yet the Museum resembled various late nineteenth-century mass spectacles inspired by the city of Venice, including Imre Kiralfy’s “Venice in London” and the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Focusing on the Venetian theme in both the museum and spectacles allows us to see the museum as part of a late nineteenth-century retrofitting of European imperialist tropes for the specific context of United States empire in the Gilded Age.