I grew up in a museum. To say it was unusual would be an understatement, but it seemed somewhat normal at the time. I was four years old when my family moved into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, a grand Venetian-inspired palazzo full of priceless art and elegant furnishings, which I called home from 1970 to 1989. Due to my father’s job as the museum’s Director, we lived in the spacious apartment on the fourth floor that Mrs. Gardner built for herself and where she lived until her death in 1924. Growing up surrounded by art had a profound influence on my own evolution as an artist.

Mrs. Gardner was a dynamic woman who built the museum to showcase her burgeoning collection of art and ephemera. In her lifetime, she acquired ancient sculptures and paintings by masters such as Rembrandt, Whistler and Sargeant (who Gardner befriended and who painted her portrait several times). The museum’s galleries are works of art in themselves, and she stipulated in her will that nothing should ever be moved or changed, so the museum has remained a time capsule of her extraordinary vision.

As a child, my artistic imagination was fueled by the museum’s collection, which is akin to a giant cabinet of curiosities from different countries and centuries. I was fascinated by the many statues and paintings of lions, dragons and creatures, and by the works pertaining to Greek myths, which I had read about. I didn’t have any particular reverence for the significant works in the collection, and instead considered the museum a large playground. My favorite piece was the enclosed sedan chair in the Veronese Room, which I would slyly enter and imagine I was a queen or princess being carried somewhere important. More than once, I sat on the ancient throne in the courtyard, but always avoided walking across the center mosaic of the menacing Medusa’s head.

My family and I were keenly aware that we were living in a museum. Our apartment looked onto the atrium, which was surrounded by Gothic windows and balustrades, some of which had been pulled from the Ca’Doro in Venice. The courtyard held an impressive mix of Greco-Roman statues, marble columns, capitols, reliefs, funerary monuments and a fountain with two carved dolphins spouting water from their open mouths. When the museum was open, I would sometimes catch a visitor staring up at me quizzically, wondering what took place on the mysterious fourth floor, which was off limits to the public. On Mondays, when the museum was closed, my brother and I would occasionally wade into the fountain and collect the spare change thrown into it, along with wishes.

Myriad plants and flowers bloomed in the courtyard year-round, an oasis of life during the Boston winters. However, even on sunny days, the galleries were not well lit and the amalgam of Ancient, Byzantine, Romanesque, and Renaissance furnishings, together with religious icons, made my playground austere and creepy. At night, as I lay in bed, I could hear the heavy footsteps of the night guards walking above my head down the attic hallway. We knew bats lived up there, but there were other strange noises in the night and I believed the rumors that the museum was haunted. 

Two pillars formed the foundation of my life as an artist. The first was my childhood in the museum, surrounded by exceptional art and artifacts. The second was my father, who delighted in discussing art with me. My parents took me through art collections and churches all over Europe. As we wandered through the galleries, my father would inspire me with secrets about the artists—like the way Cezanne always placed a bit of red in his work. My father was also devoted to literature, film, and music and would play Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, and Glen Miller records for me and tell me stories about the musicians and their lives. After he retired, he took up painting watercolors and we would sketch and paint together.

I became the family photographer at an early age. Although my father owned several cameras, he had a knack for opening them at the wrong moment and exposing the film. I majored in art history in college, but it wasn’t until I saw an exhibition of photography at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston that I realized my camera could be a means of artistic expression.

My family’s life in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum also instilled in me a love of travel, especially to Venice. Mrs. Gardner not only built her museum as a palazzo, but also spent a great deal of time there and displayed many paintings of Venice, along with furniture, lace, and other ephemera she purchased there. The museum and my parents’ philanthropic work with the Save Venice organization took us to Italy often, and when I was adrift in college and uncertain of my future, it was my father who suggested that I apply for an internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. This began my long love affair with Venice. My father often visited me there, as his work brought him abroad. On these trips, I would accompany him to see restoration works in progress on various churches and paintings.

After college, I returned to Venice once again to work at the Biennale. Desperate to stay after the exhibitions had closed, I took odd jobs and was working as a nanny on the Lido when my parents called me home. My father had quarreled with the trustees and decided to take early retirement; we had to pack up our home and leave the museum. He died less than three years later of a heart attack in his sleep. I was 25, and lost without him.

Almost 15 years later, I felt compelled to return to Venice and create a project about the city. I was shocked by the changes I saw to this place that had meant so much to me. On the third night, with the fog spilling in from the lagoon, I saw a man who looked just like my father ascending a bridge into the misty night. I followed him until he disappeared into the maze of streets, but that first picture of him became the seed of my series, Lost Venice.

This series addresses the fragility and impermanence of life—the sudden death of my father and the loss of my childhood home. Many of the pictures of balconies, statues and marble staircases hold echoes of the Gardner Museum, and the maze of streets allowed me to capture the searching and longing that I felt. The work speaks to the city of Venice, whose foundations are built on salt water and rapidly eroding, but also to the loss of the Venetian way of life. For me, the city is ethereal and alluring, but haunted with memories.

This article first appeared in Issue 13, The Museum Issue.

Sarah Hadley lives in Los Angeles and is currently working on a project about her extraordinary childhood growing up in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. A book of Lost Venice was published by Daminai editore in 2019.