WHAT would you call a woman who drinks beer, drives a locomotive, or walks a lion on a leash down the street in Boston? Liberated? Pretentious? Health nut? Isabella Stewart Gardner did all these things in Boston in the 1890's; she was cheered, jeered, envied and snubbed. This unusual woman viewed the streets of Cambridge and Boston as canals leading to her inside-out, quasi-Venetian palace just across from the Museum of Fine Arts, on the Fens of Boston. With a mere handkerchief she outbid Europe for a Vermeer, and with her husband's shipping fortune she bought a great collection of Italian paintings.

Mrs. Jack Gardner's drab, geodesic, erratic building, which finally opened to the public after her death in 1924, is composed of antique fragments imported from Italy (consisting of balustrades, columns, Gothic windows), of paintings (many Italian masterpieces selected by Harvard's most famous art student, Bernard Berenson) and of manuscripts (from Dante's Inferno to Keats's poetry). She took an interest in young musicians as well as their music, giving aspiring players a chance to perform private concerts before their New York debuts.

From Charles Eliot Norton's art lectures at Harvard, she learned of John Ruskin- his exultation of the natural and living architecture. Thus today, her grand home in the Fenway overflows with spring flowers every year- orange nasturtiums cascade from the upper stories into the sky-lighted courtyard splashed with daffodils, orchids, and lillies.

A professor like Charles Eliot Norton was a good friend to have, not only for Isabella Stewart Gardner but for Bernard Berenson. It was due to Norton's suggestion that Belle Gardner started collecting rare books and manuscripts instead of gowns and jewels, and it was Norton who got a group of wealthy Bostonians to finance a traveling fellowship for Berenson when he lost the Parker Fellowship in 1887 to another Harvard student.

Berenson set off for Europe after thanking and saying goodbye to one of the most generous supporters of his trip- Mrs. Jack Gardner. A correspondence between Mrs. Jack and her protege Berenson commenced, yet his unproductive and lackluster early years of study brought a stop to the letters and financial encouragement of Mrs. Gardner. Not until 1894, when Berenson presented her with "a little book on Venetian painting," was he to regain her confidence, this time a confidence great enough for her to want him as her art consultant.

Even before Berenson began to cultivate Mrs. Jack's taste in the arts, Mr. and Mrs. Jack Gardner had bought a few paintings on their own- based on their own likes and dislikes. The Concert by Vermeer was bought at the Hotel Druout auction galleries in Paris in 1892; the little Dutch girl seated at the piano with the light streaming in through the window captivated Belle Gardner. In the Gardner Museum's Dutch room today, where the light falls on the stone floor, the Vermeer shines as one of the most exquisite of the artist's works anywhere in the world.

OFTEN Mrs. Jack's propensities for certain art works were meshed with her proclivity for collecting artists as well as art. John Singer Sargent, James McNeil Whistler, and writers such as Henry James and F. Marion Crawford were only a few noteworthies of her creative entourage.

Sargent painted a portrait of Belle Gardner that stirred up quite a few waves along the Charles River: Mrs. Jack was pictured with a black dress wrapped quite tightly for a Boston matron, a V-cut neckline with a single strand of pearls reiterating the circular lines of her tiny waist and a single red ruby dropping from the pearls; the portrait was not nearly as risque as others that Sargent was painting at the time, but when Jack Gardner heard the comments about the picture, he forbid its public exhibition. The gossip was that, "Sargent had painted Mrs. Gardner all the way down to Crawford's Notch."

The gossip about F. Marion Crawford was that he read Italian aloud to Mrs. Gardner, Crawford wrote many romantic novels, one concerned with Boston and Mrs. Jack called The American Politician. Van Wyck Brooks had pictured New England after the Civil War as an Indian Summer; Crawford had seasonally pictured this Boston lady as "summer days and flowers and wind-blown water and the happy rustle of spring leaves."

Brooks had yet another picture of Isabella Stewart Gardner: "a local Queen Elizabeth, she cut off heads right and left and stuck them on again if it pleased her to do so; and, when the Bostonians called her an upstart, she cut off their ancestral heads by proving that she belonged to the house of Stuart."

Berenson was also aware of Isabella Stewart Gardner's familial vanity; he sold her portraits of Isabellas and paintings owned by Isabellas, Mrs. Jack "equated herself with all the Isabellas of History- from Spain to Italy- and so thorough was her identification that she would buy any work of art that was at all connected with any one of these illustrious ladies."

AFTER reading with Charles Eliot Norton's Dante Society and talking with Crawford about Italian writing, Mrs. Jack felt the need to surround herself with original Italian oils. Her pipeline to Italian art was filled by Bernard Berenson; The Tragedy of Lucretia by Botticelli was one of her first investments in her Italian art venture.

Another Berenson-directed investment, and this time one that would pay off as one of the greatest Italian paintings the world would ever see, was Titian's Rape of Europa. Few paintings have served as such imaginative inspiration to other artists; it is known that Rubens and Sir Joshua Reynolds had copies from the original in Venice; this painting also influenced Van Dyck and Rembrandt, as well as the Spanish school (e. g. Velazquez). The picture is of a white bull carrying away the swirlingscafed Europa on his back; blue vs. red is the dominant color scheme typical of Titian's early works.

A most alluring painting, a fresco, is Picro della Francesca's Hercules. The Italians also felt this work quite attractive, for laws were established to prevent taking such masterpieces out of the country, Mrs. Gardner had already bought the giant; it was only a question of getting him to Boston. A dealer got last-minute permission for Hercules' export, and the painted plaster took its place in the Museum's Early Italian Room.

Also in the Early Italian Room is a five-panelled work by Simone Martini, The Madonna and Child, With Four Saints. This work is the only complete Martini altarpiece of so large a size that exists outside of Italy; this was another Berenson acquisition. The panels' depiction of the virgin and saints anticipates the poetry of a later Italian artist, Modigliani.

Other spoils of Berenson's Italian conquests include Raphael's Pieta and a portrait of a Roman Count, a Guardi scene of Venice, Botticelli's Madonna and Child, Giotto's Jesus, Fra Angelico's Assumption, etc. Few museums equal the Gardner's extensive collection of Italian masters. But Berenson was not to stop at conquering Italian walls; sensing Mrs. Jack's interest in a bargain, he induced her to buy Durer, Holbein, Rubens, and Rembrandt.

A 23-year-old Rembrandt (Self-portrait of 1629) watches over the Dutch Room today as visitors look at his other paintings: The Sea of Galilee, The Obelisk, and A Lady and Gentleman in Black; each adds a matching pearl to her string of great masters.

Mrs. Jack was always doing her own collecting concurrently with art expert Berenson's advice. An example of her personal astuteness was the addition to her collection of Anders Zorn (painter and paintings), whom she met in 1893 at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Mrs. Gardner was walking through the exhibit when she saw a painting that she liked, The Omnibus, she asked a man in the gallery who had done it; it was the artist himself, Anders Zorn. She bought the picture of passengers in a bus, and from there started another of her artist friendships.

Zorn's Mrs. Gardner at Venice is one of the most flattering portraits of the cestatic Mrs. Jack, bursting in from the balcony overlooking The Grand Canal in Venice.

MRS GARDNER'S will has some of the flavor of the Miss Havisham scene in Dickens' Great Expectations - she wanted everything kept the way she left it. She explicitly specified that not an article be added or moved from its place in her house, for if anything was changed, the Museum and the funding to support it would become the property of Harvard University:

if they shall at any time change the general disposition or arrangement of any articles which shall have been placed in the Museum . . . then I give the said land, Museum, pictures, statuary, works of art and bric-a-brac, furniture, books and papers, and the said shares and the staid trust fund, to the President and Follows of Harvard College. . . .

Mrs. Jack never forget Charles Eliot Norton's inspiring lectures at Harvard not the wisdom that Berenson applied to amass her Italian collection.

Mrs. Jack never specified in her will that concerts be given in her Venetian Palace after her death, yet the trustees of the Museum decided that it was the intent of her will to continue support for young musicians by providing performances at the Museum. These concerts three days a week continue the tradition of giving starting performers a chance before their big debuts.

The Gardner Museum is in fact Mrs. Jack's jewel box with its own Vermeer quality of natural lighting, stone floors, Gothic windows, and Flemish tapestries. The spring flowers that fill the courtyard intertwine with the Venetian stone and grow into ornamented columns. Her museum is a refuge from the noise, the pollution, and the threatening man-made environment today; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, unchanged in all these years, is one brief moment caught from fleeting time.