Isabella Stewart Gardner

Art Collector

  • Born: April 14, 1840
  • Birthplace: New York, New York
  • Died: July 17, 1924
  • Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

American art collector and patron

Gardner, one of the greatest collectors of European art of her day, built the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, or Fenway Court, in Boston, to house her impressive collections.

Areas of achievement Patronage of the arts, philanthropy, art

Early Life

Isabella Stewart (later Isabella Stewart Gardner) was the oldest of the four children of David and Adelia Smith Stewart. Her mother’s ancestors were Puritan colonists; her father, a wealthy coal mine owner, was descended from Mary, Queen of Scots. Isabella, a high-spirited and rebellious girl, was educated privately and traditionally in her Manhattan home. She spent summers at the family farm on Long Island, where she developed a taste for outdoor sports.

88801772-109068.jpg

At sixteen, she entered a finishing school in Paris. There she met a Boston girl whose brother, John Lowell Gardner, fell in love with her when she returned to America. Gardner’s family was not only wealthy but also socially prominent. Isabella Stewart and John Gardner married at Grace Church (Episcopal) in New York on April 10, 1860, and settled on Boston’s Beacon Street in a house built for them by David Stewart.

The couple was young, well connected, and rich. Nevertheless, things did not go well for them. Isabella’s health was not good, and she did not immediately fit into Boston society. A child was born in 1863, but he died within two years; Isabella was told she could have no more children. She became despondent and lapsed into depression. European travel was prescribed for her. When in 1867 Isabella was carried up a ship’s gangway on a mattress, she did not know that she was embarking on her life’s work.

Life’s Work

In Europe, Isabella Gardner (known by the nickname Mrs. Jack) emerged from her low spirits. The Gardners sailed up the coast of Norway, visited St. Petersburg, Russia, and then traveled south to Vienna and Paris. Along the way, she began to develop a passion for art of all kinds. Some scholars believe that this passion was born in Copenhagen when she viewed the sculptures of Albert Bertel Thorwaldsen. The trip invigorated Gardner in many different ways. When she returned in 1868, Boston society saw not a social failure nor even a budding art patron, but a forceful and adventurous member of the best society. She was not conventionally beautiful; her face could be called plain. However, her figure was perfect and full and her manners were vivacious and alluring. Her dress was daring, her jewels (especially her strings of pearls) were dazzling, her dancing was graceful, her parties were famous, and her behavior was flamboyant, eccentric, and even reckless. Her flirtations and possible love affairs inspired gossip, envy, and outrage, but she was too wealthy and powerful to be ignored. (Whether any of her protégés or admirers became her lovers is still unknown.)

Gardner did not let society cut her off from other interests. She helped raise three orphaned nephews. She did church work (she was a high-church Episcopalian). She liked football, baseball (she was a Red Sox fan), and prizefights; she conversed with the boxer John L. Sullivan. Later in life, she frequented the Boston Zoo and liked to play with the lions.

Her flamboyant and charming social exterior was captured beautifully by Anders Zorn’s painting Mrs. Gardner in Venice (1896). She is depicted bursting from a balcony into a room of her palazzo, telling everyone to come and watch the fireworks. More of her sensual appeal, as well as her friendly charm, can be gathered from John Singer Sargent’s full-length portrait (1888), which outlines her figure, mutes her facial features, and shows some of her famous pearls around her waist. The reception of this portrait was so sensational that John Gardner had it removed from the show, and it was never exhibited in his lifetime.

Both Zorn and Sargent became Isabella Gardner’s friends. In her Boston home (and in her Venetian palazzo), she entertained writers and intellectuals such as historian Henry Adams, poet James Russell Lowell, author and philanthropist Julia Ward Howe, physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes, Irish author Lady Augusta Gregory, and the James brothers, William the psychologist and Henry the novelist. Henry James, who could discern Gardner’s essential innocence, became a particularly close friend, and she had a serious flirtation with novelist F. Marion Crawford. Musicians such as pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski and singer Madame Nellie Melba visited and performed in her salon. Even the Boston Symphony presented concerts there. Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard preached there the wonders of Italian culture. Gardner also joined the Dante Society and began collecting rare books. The highlight of the Gardners’ trip around the world in 1883 was a visit to the ruins of Angkor Wat, then newly discovered in Cambodia. As a result of this trip, they began to collect Asian art.

It was studying and collecting works of European art, however, that more and more captured Gardner’s attention. She knew great galleries from her schoolgirl days, and in the 1880’s she studied paintings in Munich, Vienna, Venice, and Florence, and bought works from the American artist James McNeill Whistler.

In 1891, her father died. Her substantial inheritance enabled her to translate her educated tastes into action. Under the guidance of the young Harvard graduate Bernard Berenson, she began to collect in earnest, principally paintings by Old Masters. Her life during the 1890’s was one of searching and bargaining for works for her collection. She bought old chairs, tapestries, Persian rugs, terra-cotta reliefs, carved chests, and altarpieces. She bought, usually with Berenson’s help, Jan Vermeer’s Le Concert, Whistler’s Harmony in Blue and Silver, Sandro Botticelli’s The Death of Lucretia, Guardi’s View of Venice, Rembrandt’s self-portrait as a young man, a bust by Benevenuto Cellini, Titian’s Rape of Europa, Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Philip IV, and portraits by Raphael and Peter Paul Rubens.

She entered into the second stage of her life’s work when these works threatened to overwhelm the Beacon Street house. As early as 1896, the Gardners began to plan to locate a museum in the outskirts of Boston on a recently drained swamp. In Europe in 1897, they bought architectural items to incorporate into that building: columns, balconies, capitols, frescoes, mirrors, and a mosaic pavement. When John Gardner died in 1898, Isabella, though temporarily in seclusion, hardly broke stride. She bought more works: Paolo Veronese’s ceiling painting Psyche Received into Olympus, Hans Holbein and Albrecht Dürer portraits, Fra Angelico’s Death and the Assumption of the Virgin, Botticelli’s The Madonna and Child of the Eucharist, a panel by Giotto, and a Raphael pietà.

She bought the swampland in the Fenway region of Boston and then, as secretly as possible, began to build Fenway Court (the museum’s official name). She supervised the construction in every intricate detail; though she may have driven her architects and workers to despair, the result was spectacular: a Venetian palace, modeled in particular on the Palazzo Bardini and on the Palazzo Barbero, where Zorn had painted her. On the museum’s official seal was Isabella Gardner’s personal motto: C’est mon plaisir (it is my pleasure).

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the Fenway was opened by invitation on January 1, 1903. Guests were welcomed at the top of the main staircase by Gardner, dressed in black and wearing two large diamonds mounted on springs so that they waved about her head like antennae. Only after a concert in the music room were the guests permitted to enter the rest of the building, a four-sided courtyard lit by candles and torches and topped by a glass roof. The floor of the courtyard was the Roman mosaic; on it rested fragments of sculpture from the ancient world; banks of flowers were everywhere. What amazed her guests even more were the rooms that surrounded the courtyard, rooms filled with the Gardner collections in arrangements designed by Gardner herself: the Raphael Room, the Dutch Room, the Titian Room, the Gothic Room.

From that time on, Gardner lived comparatively modestly in private quarters on the fourth floor of the museum, though in the museum itself she hosted many suppers, luncheons, dances, and concerts. The public was allowed in four weeks a year. She continued to buy works of art, though at a reduced pace: Piero della Francesca’s Hercules, a Madonna and child by Giovanni Bellini, and portraits by Velázquez, Édouard Manet, and Edgar Degas. She added a Spanish Cloister in 1916 to house Sargent’s large painting El Jaleo. She even learned to drive an automobile.

Gardner was slowed but not stopped by a paralytic stroke in 1919. Sargent’s affectionate watercolor of 1922, which shows her swathed in white with only her gaunt face showing, does not give adequate testimony to the energy she continued to feel. She died in July, 1924, and willed that Fenway Court be open to the public, with the proviso that its contents must remain intact and be displayed substantially as she arranged them.

Significance

As an energetic, attractive, and even reckless woman with money and high social status, Gardner shocked and fascinated the Boston aristocracy. She represented on a grand scale the new kinds of social freedom that some American women were achieving after the American Civil War. She also embodied new American attitudes toward Europe; she was able to collect European works of art and craftsmanship and bring them to a new home in the United States. She was like a Henry James heroine in her enthusiastic embrace of Europe; she was unlike James’s heroines in that, rather than being corrupted by the Old World, she triumphed. Perhaps a fitting symbol of her greatness is Mount Gardner in Washington State, which was named for her.

Gardner’s lasting influence on Boston and on American culture is her collections and museum. Both display a personal taste that, though extravagant and eclectic, was educated and imaginative. Gardner was able to discern (and often acquire) art objects of the highest quality. The critic Aline Saarinen believes that she and Bernard Berenson established the contemporary taste for American collections of Italian art. Meanwhile, Fenway Court, the exquisite embodiment of her dreams, is a repository of priceless European art, one of the greatest collections in the United States.

Bibliography

Berenson, Bernard. The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1887-1924, with Correspondence by Mary Berenson, edited by Rollin Van N. Hadley. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987. Berenson, an eminent art authority, and Gardner exchanged hundreds of letters between 1887 and her death. The letters reflect their friendship and give a detailed account of their struggles in putting together the Gardner collection. Illustrated.

Brooks, Van Wyck. New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940. This famous work of literary history gives a superficial and largely unfavorable view of Gardner’s activities.

Carter, Morris. Isabella Stewart Gardner and Fenway Court. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925. An authoritative, sympathetic, and detailed first biography, full of Gardner’s correspondence, written by a man who worked for Gardner in her last years. Many illustrations, mainly early photographs.

Edel, Leon. Henry James. 3 vols. New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1953-1972. Many scattered references show James’s affection for Gardner, his paradoxical judgments of her, and how her life echoed his major themes. Edel thinks Henry James draws on Gardner and on Palazzo Barbaro for details in The Wings of the Dove.

Hardy, Philip. European and American Paintings in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Boston: Trustees of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1974. This illustrated catalog is useful in demonstrating Gardner’s taste and achievements as a collector. Contains reproductions of the Sargent and Zorn portraits.

Saarinen, Aline B. The Proud Possessors: The Lives, Times, and Tastes of Some Adventurous American Art Collectors. New York: Random House, 1958. The informative chapter on Gardner is the best short introduction to her life and achievements. The book places her in the context of other great American collectors.

Tharp, Louise Hall. Mrs. Jack: A Biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. Well researched and readable. Tharp gives much more background information than does Morris Carter on the Gardner family and on many intimate aspects of Isabella Gardner’s life: the Boston gossip about her, her jewelry, and her friendships.

Vigderman, Patricia. The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Louisville, Ky.: Sarabande Books, 2007. This exploration of Gardner’s museum also examines Gardner’s life.

1901-1940: November 8, 1929: New York’s Museum of Modern Art Opens to the Public.

1941-1970: October 20, 1942: Peggy Guggenheim’s Gallery Promotes New American Art; October 21, 1959: Wright-Designed Guggenheim Museum Opens; September 28, 1966: Breuer Designs a Building for the Whitney Museum.