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9. James Whistler "Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach" - Whistler’s emphasis on sensation and atmosphere over detailed description has been compared by some to the philosophy underpinning Gardner’s whole museum. “I see the entire museum as a correlative to these shadowy tone poems,’’ wrote the poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum of Whistler’s nocturnes.
10 of the best paintings at the Gardner

1. Titian "Europa" - Painting doesn’t get better than this. The mythological scene, which depicts Europa being abducted by Zeus in the form of a bull, is a late work by the Venetian genius, painted for Spain’s King Phillip II.
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2. Rembrandt "Self-Portrait, Aged 23" - One of the earliest self-portraits in a series of more than 90 that Rembrandt made throughout his life. The series is one of the high points of Western art.
| January 14, 2012

3. Sandro Botticelli "The Tragedy of Lucretia" - This is late Botticelli, a very different creature from the earlier painter of dreamy, part-Gothic Madonnas and mythological figures. Having shifted from tempera to oil, he pulled out all the stops here to tell three sequentially linked episodes in the story of Lucretia’s rape, a tragedy that led to the overthrow of tyranny and the declaration of the Roman republic.
| January 14, 2012

4. Giotto "The Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple" - This small panel on gold, painted around 1320 by the father of the Italian Renaissance, is full of simple human tenderness.
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5. Fra Angelico "The Death and Assumption of the Virgin" - With its transporting blues, ambitious conception, and incredibly fine detail, this jewel of a painting needs to be studied up close. It’s one of four panels Fra Angelico made for the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.
| January 14, 2012

6. Attributed to Gentile Bellini "A Seated Scribe" - This singular painting, which has intrigued scholars and inspired whole exhibitions, shows a young scribe in the Ottoman court hunched over a writing pad. Attributed - though with no great certainty - to Bellini, it is one of the most evocative and popular works in the museum.
| January 14, 2012

7. John Singer Sargent "Mrs. Gardner in White" - When she was 82, Isabella Stewart Gardner suffered a debilitating stroke. This portrait in watercolor was created by her friend, Sargent, not long afterward. It was painted in the museum’s Macknight Room, where it now hangs.
| January 14, 2012

8. John Singer Sargent "El Jaleo" - Stirringly theatrical and full of life, this enormous image of a live dance performance in Spain was painted by Sargent and is installed in the Spanish cloister on the ground floor.
| January 14, 2012

9. James Whistler "Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach" - Whistler’s emphasis on sensation and atmosphere over detailed description has been compared by some to the philosophy underpinning Gardner’s whole museum. “I see the entire museum as a correlative to these shadowy tone poems,’’ wrote the poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum of Whistler’s nocturnes.
| January 14, 2012

10. Piero della Francesca "Hercules" - Hercules was a strong guy, as this painting makes obvious. But Piero painted him here as a young man, without his usual beard, and with an expression of uncommon serenity. In the 19th century, the picture - one of Piero’s few mythological works - was detached from a wall in the artist’s own house before being sold to Isabella Stewart Gardner 40 years later.
| January 14, 2012