I have been in love with Isabela Steward Gardner (above) for more than fifty years. And she’s been dead for over seventy. Isabel was the daughter of wealth, who, as was the practice in the Gilded Age, married into even more wealth. She lived in a Back Bay mansion at 152 Beacon Street in Boston. And in the tiny fenced front yard, common to most such mansions, there grew a single tree, in which, legend has it, Isabel used to perch on summer afternoons to unexpectedly greet her startled visitors. Of course the red head was also quoted as saying, “Why spoil a thing with the truth.”
In March of 1865, after her 2 year old son had died of pneumonia, Isabel’s husband, Jack, began to take the broken hearted Isabela on European trips. There Isabel courted and sat for artists such as John Singer Sargent and James Whistler, and partied with writers such as Henry James.
Isabel loved to collect art, and to attend boxing matches and Harvard football games. She bet the ponies at Suffolk Downs and advised her fellow blue bloods, “Win as though you were used to it, and lose as if you like it.”
And she once scandalized proper Boston society at a Philharmonic Concert by wearing a formal evening gown adorned with a headband that read “Oh, You Red Sox!”
After her husband Jack died in 1898 Isabel built herself a Venetian Mansion in the reclaimed marshlands which would shortly give Fenway Park its name. 
Isabel called her new mansion “Fenway Court”, and it held her extensive personal art collection. Included was the Singer portrait of her, wearing a strand of pearls at her waist, to accent her figure. Jack had hated the painting, but Isabela cherished it.
And it was in Fenway Court where she died of a stroke, in 1924.
Isabel left most of her fortune to the ASPCA , except for the endowment to turn her home into the “Isabela Stewart Gardner Museum”.
It would be hard not love a woman who loved animals that much, and who left so many pieces of great art so that clods such as myself could wander about her home for hours.
And that was why I was so personally offended by the 1990 St. Patrick’s Day robbery of the Gardner. What was stolen was not just art. It had all been the personal property of Isabela.
It had all meant something special to very special woman. How dare those thugs steal from a great broad like her!
Shortly after one AM on Monday, 19 March, 1990 two mustached “police officers” talked their way into the closed museum, swiftly handcuffed the two inexperienced guards and stashed them safely in the museum’s basement. Motion detectors then followed the thieves for the next 81 minutes as they separated and each smashed, cut and shattered a dozen paintings from their frames; $500 million dollars worth - a Rembrandt, five Degas, a Vermeer and a Manet: and one gold eagle from atop a Napoleonic banner. Then, after removing the video tapes from the VCRs at the security desk, the thieves made two separate trips out to their red hatch back parked around the corner from the museum. Before 3AM, the crooks and the paintings had disappeared forever.
We still don’t know who did it. But the money remains on the same kind of North End gangs that a generation earlier had robbed the Brinks Armored Car Company. But whereas the Brink’s Job of January 1950 had been the work of mooks who were all caught, the Gardner heist remains a complete and total mystery.
No one has been even tried to claim the $5 million reward for returning the art. The statute of limitations on the theft has run out and yet still no one has felt the need to unburden themselves of guilt or the hot paintings. And the only rumor that ever even hinted at the possible return of the 13 stolen masterpieces was probably just another confidence scam.
The real cops weren’t called until 8:15 AM the next morning. By that time it was likely the paintings were already on their way out of the country. The only description of the thieves that was broadcast was pathetic; one of the men was described as resembling Colonel Klink, from television show “Hogan’s Heroes”. There were no finger prints left behind, no articles of clothing, and no whispers were ever heard in art or criminal circles. 
No leads were received until four years later when a letter offered to return the paintings in exchange for $2.6 million. But after a first hint, that letter led nowhere. Again, in 1997, a reporter for the Boston Herald was led blindfolded to a hidden location and shown what he was told were the stolen Rembrandt’s, and even provided with paint chips as proof. But upon examination the chips could not have come from the painting they were claimed to be from, and the whole thing was eventually written off as an attempt to finagle the freedom of Myles Connor, an art thief already under arrest.
It has been thirty plus years since the dozen paintings were stolen, and increasingly it appears they will never be restored. There is, of course, no honor amongst thieves. It is likely by now the thieves are dead. And with the passage of time, it becomes clear that whoever masterminded the theft is now, also dead, The paintings, fragile pieces of art, have probably been destroyed.
But the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum still sits in the Back Bay, and still keeps the empty frames on the wall, to document what was lost. It is in the same spirit Isabeal must have used to preserve that torn place in her heart where her little son had once resided. It is a sad that she should be remembered because of this robbery. Because, what a great broad she was!.
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