Best underappreciated museum

Not much has changed since the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum opened its doors on New Year's Day 100 years ago. Three floors of galleries holding a premier art collection still surround a perpetually blooming courtyard garden, and live classical (and now jazz) music still tumbles through the halls. It's only fitting that Phoenix readers give the Gardner a nod during its 100th year. Indeed, the year's been marked by all sorts of centennial celebrations, exhibitions, concerts, lectures, programs, and performances. On the grimmest, coldest, bleakest dead-of-winter Boston day, the flourishing and flowering courtyard alone has the power to lift your spirits. Looking at works by Rembrandt, Titian, Degas, and Michelangelo doesn't hurt, either.

The problem with larger art museums is that you sometimes leave feeling the static in your brain that results from stimulation overload. Despite its name, the Fogg Museum, our readers' pick for the northside museum not getting the credit it deserves, won't render your head a murky, misty cloud of haze and daze. It offers a manageable amount to look at, and its collections trace the history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, with notable Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works by Renoir, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro, and Matisse, as well as Boston's most important Picasso collection. Plus, one admission price allows entrance to all three of Harvard's art museums: the Fogg, the Sackler, and the Busch-Reisinger.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 280 The Fenway, Boston, (617) 566-1401; Fogg Museum, 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, (617) 495-9400.