- Isabella Stewart Gardner,
on the creation of her Museum, 1917
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum displays an art collection of world importance, including works that rank among the most significant of their type. Isabella Stewart Gardner collected and carefully displayed a collection comprised of more than 2,500 objects - paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles, drawings, silver, ceramics, illuminated manuscripts, rare books, photographs and letters - from ancient Rome, Medieval Europe, Renaissance Italy, Asia, the Islamic world and 19th-century France and America. Built to evoke a 15th-century Venetian palace, the Museum itself provides an atmospheric setting for Isabella Stewart Gardner's inventive creation.
Historical and scholarly endeavors at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, directed by
Curator of the Collection Alan Chong, explore the Museum's permanent collection and the context of Isabella Stewart Gardner's time in order to encourage new ways of thinking about art and culture. Exhibitions examine historical and social perspectives of works of art, resulting in a truly enriching experience for visitors to the Museum. The permanent collection is today a source of inspiration for educators, thinkers and contemporary artists. In 2002, the Museum's first "Scholar-in-Residence" collaborated with Museum curators and the community on research into the life of Japanese art critic Okakura Kakuzo and his influence on Isabella Stewart Gardner. Other recent projects have begun to highlight lesser-known aspects of the permanent collection and archives.
Isabella Stewart Gardner amassed the bulk of her collection in a remarkably short period of time. Like many wealthy Americans, the Gardners bought paintings and objects to decorate their home. In the 1880s, Mrs. Gardner attended lectures on art history and readings of Dante given by Charles Eliot Norton at Harvard College. This sparked a passion for Dante, and Isabella Stewart Gardner began to buy rare editions by the writer. She became a serious collector of Dutch and Italian pictures in the 1890s. Beginning in 1894, Bernard Berenson, then a young art historian, started to recommend Italian paintings for acquisition. He was just as new at this as Mrs. Gardner was, but within two years he had guided her towards a collection that included Botticelli's Lucretia, Titian's Europa, Vermeer's The Concert and Rembrandt's Self-Portrait. Berenson acted as a conduit for paintings that Colnaghi, a London dealer, had for sale; however, Isabella Stewart Gardner made her own decisions about what to buy. In 1896, Berenson facilitated the purchase of Titian's Europa, still heralded as the "most important work of art in Boston," by Boston-area museum directors (Boston Globe, July 27, 2002).
The Gardners' travels through Asia, the Middle East and Europe fostered an appreciation for different cultures. In 1867, the Gardners traveled to St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vienna and Paris, and crossed Norway to see the midnight sun. During 1882 and 1883, they traveled around the world, visiting Japan, China, Vietnam, Cambodia (where they rode on an oxcart through the jungles to see the ruins of Angkor Wat), Indonesia, India, Egypt and Palestine.
By 1896, Isabella and Jack Gardner recognized that their house on Beacon Street in Boston's Back Bay, although enlarged once, was not large enough for the new museum they were conceiving. At first, they asked an architect to design a completely new museum to be built on the same site. Although Jack Gardner died as these plans were being readied, Mrs. Gardner realized their ambitions. Setting her sights on the Fenway, a formerly marshy area that had recently been filled, in 1898 she purchased a plot of land on which to build her Museum. Architect Willard T. Sears drew up plans and construction of Fenway Court began in June of 1899. Mrs. Gardner attended the driving of the first pile and visited the construction site regularly, carefully supervising every detail of the building. She climbed ladders to show painters the effect she sought for the interior courtyard and determined the placement of each architectural element. The building was complete by November 1901, and Isabella Stewart Gardner spent the following year carefully installing her collection. Mrs. Gardner herself lived in an apartment on the fourth floor.
On January 1, 1903, Isabella Stewart Gardner opened her Museum for the first time, inviting friends to attend an evening reception and performance by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. On February 23rd, Mrs. Gardner opened the Museum to the public. She ensured that her Museum was the setting for artists, musicians and thinkers. John Singer Sargent used the Gothic Room as a studio. The famed operatic soprano Nellie Melba sang within the Museum; Ruth St. Denis, an innovative modern choreographer danced there as well. The Japanese art historian and critic Okakura Kakuzo (author of The Book of Tea) became especially close to Gardner and shared his knowledge about Asian spirituality, by for example, arranging an exhibition devoted to Japanese culture and performing the tea ceremony at the Museum.
Isabella Stewart Gardner disliked the cold, mausoleum-like spaces of most American museums of the period. As a result, she designed Fenway Court around a central courtyard filled with flowers. Light enters the galleries from the courtyard and from exterior windows, creating an atmospheric setting for works of art. Love of art, not knowledge about the history of art, was her aim. Her friends noted that the entire museum was a work of art in itself. Individual objects became part of a rich, complex and intensely personal setting.
The Museum also provides personal glimpses into the sensibilities and personality of Isabella Stewart Gardner, poignant testaments to her personal tragedies and triumphs. The loss of her only child at the age of two is suggested in the Spanish Chapel, opposite John Singer Sargent's El Jaleo (1882), a painting that celebrates the excitement of life. Titian's Europa (1561-1562) hangs above a piece of pale green silk, which had been cut from one of Isabella Stewart Gardner's gowns designed by Charles Frederic Worth. Throughout the collection, similar stories, intimate portrayals, and discoveries abound.
Ten portraits of Isabella Stewart Gardner herself are interspersed throughout the collection, including John Singer Sargent's Isabella Stewart Gardner (1888), Anders Zorn's Mrs. Gardner in Venice (1894), and James McNeill Whistler's The Little Note in Yellow and Gold (1886). The sense of vitality and artistic flair that she found in Venice - and by which she lived her life - is eloquently captured in Zorn's Mrs. Gardner in Venice, 1894. Painted in the Palazzo Barbaro, the portrait captures the moment when Isabella Stewart Gardner, watching fireworks from a balcony, stood in the doorway, arms outstretched and invited her guests to join her to watch the display. Today, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's historic collection remains as Mrs. Gardner created it, a collection of intimate effect and ongoing inspiration for visual, musical and horticultural innovation and scholarly thinking.
