The director of a world renowned museum has praised a Bermuda museum saying what has been created is "special".

Anne Hawley, Norma Jean Calderwood director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Massachusetts, was in Bermuda this week to give a lecture for the Masterworks Museum of Art.

But she told The Royal Gazette: "I think what has been created here at the Masterworks Museum is special. It is a young museum. I imagine it will go through many stages as it unfolds."

Mrs. Hawley was introduced to Masterworks Foundation director Tom Butterfield several years ago.

The lecture held on Tuesday, was titled 'The Museum as Autobiography: Isabella Stewart Gardner Collects and Creates'.

Mrs. Hawley spoke about how the Gardner Museum tells, on many levels, the story of founder Isabella Stewart Gardner's life.

The Gardner museum is located around the corner from the much larger Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in the Fenway area of Boston.

Mrs. Hawley said that what is unusual about the Gardner museum is that the museum itself is a work of art.

"Isabella Stewart Gardner was the woman who imagined it and brought it to life through her creating the building and collections," said Mrs. Hawley. "She was born in New York in 1840.

"She was taken by her family to study in Paris when she was 15 years old. She spent several years in Europe with her family."

In Paris, the young Isabella Stewart fell in love with art museums and collections.

"She wrote a letter to a friend saying that if she ever got any money she would try and make an art museum," said Mrs. Hawley. "It was her idea that America didn't have access to beautiful objects and opportunities to study it

Her father, David Stewart, died in 1896. She inherited his fortune made from a mining and iron business in Pennsylvania.

"She began to collect in earnest bits and pieces from old buildings from Venice and Rome," said Mrs. Hawley. "She started to warehouse this architectural material and also to collect pictures she put in her house.

"She started to imagine the museum she was going to create. It was a remarkable achievement for a woman at that time."

She married John Lowell Gardner in 1860. They had one son, who died before the age of two from pneumonia. Her husband died two years after her father.

"She began to build the museum several months after her husband died," said Mrs. Hawley. "She had been planning it and he had been assisting."

Mrs. Gardner developed her museum so people would get a total experience of the senses, making a garden in the centre of it. The garden included ancient sculpture and plants and flowers grown on the property."

The museum is home to art treasures from the Italian Renaissance, the Dutch 17th Century School of Art, ancient Greece and Rome, and much more. The Gardners collected over 2,000 paintings.

"She designed every aspect to be a total experience," said Mrs. Hawley. "So you are taken into this creation of a Venetian Renaissance palace. You can experience art from several centuries."

The museum was first opened in 1903. The art in the museum does not include labels.

"She didn't want people trying to teach themselves," said Mrs. Hawley. "She wanted people to experience it — to look at the pictures, statues and tapestry and just enjoy them and not read labels.

"But when she was making the museum, labels weren't so important as they are today. People tended to look rather than read."

But the museum does now offer its visitors acoustic guides and various publications to read.

When Mrs. Gardner died in 1924 her will stipulated that her collections remain as they were.

"Her will left the museum 'for the education and enjoyment of the public forever'," said Mrs. Hawley. "It is also stated in her will that she did not want anyone to change the arrangement of the objects.

"She wanted it to stand as a work of art. She didn't want future generations taking things down or putting things up. It is her creation."

Mrs. Hawley said the people who run the museum today, happily put up with such requests.

"It doesn't really cause any headaches," said Mrs. Hawley. "We are half a block away from the MFA, an encyclopedic museum — one with objects from many different areas and cultures.

"People can go there if that is what they want. For us to keep this museum as a distinct artistic creation for a different kind of experience is fine."

And the stipulations aren't stopping the Gardner Museum from going forward into the future. Although its trustees can't change much inside the museum, they can change what's outside the museum.

They are now in the process of building a new addition to the Gardner Museum.

"It is going to secure us for the next century," said Mrs. Hawley. "The museum is over 100 years old. It really was getting far too much wear and tear from visitors.

"It was all museum. There weren't extra spaces for offices and classrooms. We have been carving spaces out. Our classroom was in the basement, and offices on the fourth floor which was meant to be a residence. We have 200,000 visitors a year and Mrs. Gardner only had several thousand when she was alive. It was too much for the building. We are constructing a new addition behind the museum."

The new addition is being designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano. It will take all the practical functions out of the main museum, such as coat checks, ticket desk, offices and classrooms.

Unfortunately, in March 1990, the museum was struck by tragedy. Thieves, dressed as police officers, removed 13 works of art with an estimated value of $300 million. Works stolen included: Vermeer's 'The Concert'; three works by Rembrandt 'A Lady and Gentleman in Black', 'The Storm on the Sea of Galilee' and 'Self-Portrait'; Govaert Flinck's 'Landscape with Obelisk' and Manet's 'Chez Tortoni'.

The thieves were never caught and the theft is considered one of the greatest unsolved art heist mysteries.

"It is still under investigation," said Mrs. Hawley. "It was like a death in the family. Because it is not yet solved, it is a continuing sadness that we deal with. We have state-of-the-art security, since that happened."

She said many smaller European and American museums had had to follow suit because of the increasing prevalence of art theft.

Mrs. Hawley became director of the museum after directing the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities.

"I started out in music," said Mrs. Hawley. "I then founded a non-profit cultural organisation in the late 1970s that was working with museums and performing arts organisations and schools in Boston.

"From there I went to the arts council and from there to the Gardner Museum."

The museum is open from Tuesday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

For more information go to www.Gardnermuseum.org . For more information about Masterworks go to www.bermudamasterworks.com.