By Michael Hooper
Isabella Stewart Gardner was an extraordinary woman for her day and time in America. She cultivated arts, culture and music in Boston during the late 1800s, early 1900s. She loved intelligent educated artistic men like Henry James, John Singer Sargent, F Marion Crawford, the writer. She was a leading American art collector, philanthropist and Patron of the Arts. She was founder of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, on the Fenway.
Isabella Stewart Gardner amassed a huge collection of art, letters and books through the late 1800s early 1900s in Boston. She was born in New York she was educated in Paris and married a wealthy Boston businessman at age 18 in 1860. They traveled extensively to Japan, Cambodia, Jerusalem, Constantinople, and spent much of their time in Venice, where she gathered ideas for her own museum. Heather and I visited her museum in September after I read her biography Mrs Jack by Louise Hall Tharp, which I discovered in a shop bookshelf in July in Pine River Minnesota.
Isabella Stewart was born in New York, April 14th 1840. she was the daughter of a wealthy linen Merchant David Stewart and Adelia Smith Stewart. She claimed her family tree could be traced to Scottish nobles.
Her family attended Grace Church in New York. When she was 16 years old family moved to Paris where Isabella was enrolled in a school for American girls and her classmates included the wealthy Gardner family of Boston. She stayed in contact with Julia Gardner of Boston. In 1857 Isabella was taken to Italy where she saw a collections of Renaissance art. She said at the time if she was ever to inherit some money she would create a similar house for people to enjoy.
Shortly after returning to New York her former classmate Julia Gardner invited her to Boston where she met Julia's brother John Lowell Jack Gardner. He was the son of John L and Catherine E Peabody Gardner, and one of Boston's most eligible bachelors. They married in Grace Church on April 10th 1860 and then lived in a house that Isabella's father gave them as a wedding gift at 152 Beacon Street in Boston they would reside there for the rest of Jack's life. They also had homes in Brookline and Beverly outside of Boston.
Jack and Isabella had one son but he died about 2 years later. She had a miscarriage and was told that she could not bear any more children. This development sank her into a depression. On the advice of her doctors she and Jack traveled to Europe in 1867. The couple spent almost a year traveling, visiting Scandinavia and Russia but spending most of their time in Paris. The trip was sort of a turning point in her life long habit of keeping scrapbooks of our travels. On page 49 we see Bella Gardner Illustrated her journal with watercolor sketches many of them remarkably good in all of them credible. She wrote in her journal during many a peaceful hour and sometimes watched Palm Groves in the early Moonlight letting her thoughts fly away with the mini white sailed caiques the floated out into the fading light. Coincidentally Jack Gardner also kept a diary. His was more of a record of places they saw and things they did.
In 1874 they travel to Egypt and saw the pyramids. They also traveled to Palestine and Jerusalem and saw the Dead Sea. Mrs. Jack drank from the River Jordan and filled a bottle with river water, this she took home with her as a sacred Relic along with some desert sand from Egypt.They're also traveled to Beirut and Greece and Constantinople
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While in Paris she shopped for the latest fashions, some were a bit risque for Boston Society, her neckline was a bit low for the uppity crowd. Page 134 John Gardner overheard a story that was going around in the Men's Clubs, 'Sargent had painted Mrs. Gardner all the way down to Crawford's notch.'' She loved the painting and said it was the best thing he ever did. She paid him $3,000 for it. She rejected his depiction of her face several times before he finally got it right. Sargent had hoped to exhibit it at the next Paris Salon but Mr. Gardner refused and decreed that the portrait should never again be publicly exhibited and it never was during his lifetime. She continued to say it was the best thing Sargent ever did. The painting was exhibited at Boston's Saint Botolph. Today it hangs in the gothic room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
The Gardner's kept a large house in Beacon Street but also had a house in Beverly outside of Boston. There they did horseback riding and had a large garden.
She she helped raise three nephews and saw to it that they got a good education. The nephew's often lived with them. She read to them several Charles Dickens' books, including Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities.
Isabella Gardner was not the most beautiful woman in the world she perhaps was the most fashionable in Boston. She wore diamonds in her hair crafted by Tiffany. Maud Howe Elliott, writing from Rome to the Boston Transcript, said Mrs. Jack Gardner wore wonderful costumes from Paris and such furs, sables and chinchillas.
Perhaps one of the most amazing contributions to come out of her life was the idea of sponsoring artists and writers. No doubt she seemed fond of young Harvard Men, but she genuinely was curious and willing to sponsor intelligent intellectuals and artists.
By 1894 the Gardners had established a pattern of spending alternate summers in Europe.
The Gardners often sponsored artists and writers and Young students at Harvard. Bernard Berenson was one such a fellow. On page 129 he wants to win the Parker traveling fellowship at Harvard his marks were high especially in languages and he knew that he and only one other student were being considered the other Man won. But some of Berenson's professors and a few friends raised several hundred dollars to give Berenson a traveling fellowship. The Gardners were among them. Over time Berenson would prove to be a valuable resource in helping Isabella Gardner acquire art in Europe.
One George Proctor, a budding musician, seemed to attract her attention. She sponsored him so he could study in Vienna. A total of $7,000 in 1892 so he could study under Leschetizky (page 159). He wrote letters to Mrs. Jack. These letters encouraged her. She invited him to join the Gardners in Venice in 1893.
Venice at this time would have been amazing. George met with musicians in the Palazzo Barbaro. He was treated like an honored guest. Page 180, he gushed about how great this experience was for him.
She took guests in a big gondola and hired a piano and musicians and loaded them all onto other boats and had them follow her and play music along the Grand Canal. Fireworks could be seen every night. (page 182).
After Jack died, she started working on her museum. She hired an architect who went through extraordinary efforts to keep her satisfied. He hired workers from Italy to build her museum. Disgusted with their performance, she would often show them exactly how she wanted things done. She fired them but the architect would hire them back.
Her Museum is unique because she curated the entire thing she picked all of the art for the every room and the art is incredible dating all the way back to the time of Christ. She has art stones dating to the Phoenicians, she has art from the Romans and the Greeks, and she had many pieces by prominent artists like Rembrandt and Raphael. Many of these pieces she purchased at rock bottom prices from Nobles who were broke and needed cash.
When Heather and I visited the museum, we noticed it had changed considerably. It was located near the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Supporters of the Gardner museum added an entirely new wing to the museum to support a gift shop, library, conference rooms and cafeteria. All of those support services used to be in the original museum.
Some disturbing things happened over time. In the 1970s, a director of the museum sold the large Buddha that had been part of a Chinese Asian art collection.
In the original agreement for the museum, she said that if anyone tried to sell the contents of the museum, the entire collection is to be sold and proceeds given to Harvard.
I asked two different people in the museum if an Isabella Stewart Gardner could exist today. One man said no, because she was a product of her times. Another woman, however, said yes, a woman could indeed accomplish all that Gardner had done. There are certainly wealthy women today, but how many actually speak English and French and have read Dante and spent a lifetime corresponding with artists and writers who were as significant as her friends?
I tend to believe she was anomaly, unique in her upbringing, with finishing school in Paris and an aptitude for the arts. Her own journals were full of watercolors and drawings and descriptions of the places and people she met around the world. I can only think of Peggy Guggenheim as a similar force in a later era.
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is making a lasting difference. The day we were there, I saw hundreds of people. I met a young man from Italy who was studying economics at MIT, he was totally enamored with the museum.
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