For decades, Bostonians followed newspaper accounts chronicling the globe-trotting exploits and extensive art collecting of one of the city's most iconoclastic characters, Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924). Gardner and her husband amassed over 2,500 works of art, many of them near-priceless treasures. All of them reside inside her former home, a lavish Italianate villa known as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Gardner was born on April 14, 1840 in New York City. She was the first daughter of David Stewart, a second-generation Scottish-American, and Adelia Smith, whose father had owned a tavern and stable at Old Ferry, Brooklyn. The Stewart family fortune came from a mining and iron business in Pennsylvania. However, her father had grown up near Jamaica, Long Island, New York, on a farm which his daughter would come to love during visits to her formidable paternal grandmother, to whom she was compared as a child because of her own...