Life in the Museum

 

Mrs. Gardner's work did not end with the opening of the museum. She ensured that musicians, dancers, and artists filled her galleries and enriched the atmosphere of Fenway Court. In 1903, John Singer Sargent set up a studio in the museum, and a constant series of concerts showcased celebrity performers as well as young composers. The soprano Nellie Melba sang at the Gardner Museum, and the innovative modern dancer Ruth St. Denis gave a charity performance. Mrs. Gardner cultivated a lively salon of stimulating thinkers and writers.

Gardner also ensured that her museum would be professionally organized. She had her collection and galleries photographed, and initiated cataloguing projects. She selected the first director, and most importantly ensured that the museum would have an endowment for its future. At the time of her death, she left the museum more than $3 million.

 
 

John Singer Sargent painting in the Gothic Room
(five photographs of Sargent painting Mrs. Fiske Warren and her daughter)
Sarah Choate Sears (?)
Photographs, 1903

October 31, 2001-January 1, 2002

Last fall, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum presented a new series of works by British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, who use grass as a photographic medium. Ackroyd and Harvey's "photographs" cast in grass are created through a photosynthetic print process. Instead of black and white, the images are shades of green and yellow. Their exhibition, entitled Presence and organized by Gardner Museum Contemporary Curator Pieranna Cavalchini, was part of an artist-in-residence program that enables artists to study the Gardner's preeminent collection and visitors to experience the work of emerging talent and ideas.

© Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum