| dc.description.abstract | Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) created her own collection museum at the beginning of the 20th century, Gardner Museum is an important donor memorial museum, because it was founded by a woman, which makes it cannot be ignored. Compared to other public museums, the collections, display, and environment of Gardner Museum is completely affected by its creator. Mrs. Gardner, who enjoyed providing unique ideas about operating her museum. The quality of Old Master collections in the museum are highly applausive. On the other hand, although contemporary paintings are relatively not so striking, Mrs. Gardner paid a lot of effort in arranging these works. In order to understand the founder’s strategy of museum operation. This thesis focuses on the contents and displays of contemporary painting in Mrs. Gardner’s museum, especially the pieces of Mrs. Gardner’s portraits, depicted by contemporary painters.
The first chapter traces Mrs. Gardner’s collections and sponsorship activities, as well as her ideas in creation of the museum. This thesis divide the chapter into three aspects, for the country, for the founder, and for the viewers. Mrs. Gardner’s sponsorship of artists directly affected her contemporary collection of paintings. The second chapter examines the content and display of contemporary collections, suspect Mrs. Gardner’s motives and purposes of collecting works of art, whether mutually authentication with other collections in the museum, or by her own unique strategy. The third chapter focuses on Mrs. Gardner’s portraits, which depicted by the contemporary painters, especially Sargent and Zorn. Those portraits showed Mrs. Gardner in different styles, and we could suspect the image she wanted to appear to the public. Also, the display modes of portrait is changed with different personal image. Mrs. Gardner’s display strategy not only reinforces the meaning of the works, more importantly, she highlighted her personal presence and personality to audience, moreover, declared that she is the great founder of the museum.
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