Isabella Stewart Gardner spends more than three decades traveling the globe to assemble one of the world's great private art collections, and this film tracks how a wealthy Bostonian born in New York in 1840 turned that habit into a museum. Cameras move through the building she designed to look like a Venetian palazzo, its courtyard planted with flowers around a fountain, and linger on works by Rembrandt, Raphael, and Titian alongside oddities she prized just as highly: a lock of Napoleon's hair, a letter from George Washington. The film makes a point of noting that curators still hang many rooms exactly as Gardner arranged them over a century ago, her will treating the collection as a fixed artwork rather than a rotating exhibit. Interviews and museum footage trace her role as a patron who opened her home to musicians and artists long before the building became a public institution. Produced for public television by Great Museums TV, it stays close to the objects and the rooms rather than the myth around her.