Isabella Stewart Gardner – Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

“Don’t spoil a good story by telling the truth.”
– Isabella Stewart Gardner

 

Isabella Stewart Gardner was born in New York City on April 14, 1840, into a well-to-do family. Her father, David Steward, made his fortune importing Irish linen and later through investments.

The family lived on University Place in the West Village. Isabella was privately educated in New York and “finished” abroad. A Paris schoolmate, Julia Gardner, introduced Isabella to her brother, John “Jack” Lowell Gardner Jr.

In 1860, a few days before her 20th birthday, Isabella Stewart married Jack Gardner in Grace Church in New York City. They moved to his hometown of Boston and settled into a house in the fashionable Back Bay at 152 Beacon Street – a wedding gift from her father.

In 1863, the Gardners had a son, John Lowell Gardner III, called Jackie, who died of pneumonia at less than two years old. In 1867, on the advice of her doctor and hoping to rouse her from her depression, Jack Gardner took Isabella to northern Europe and Russia. This was the first of many trips abroad, later including Egypt and the Middle East (1874-75), and Asia (1883-84). Isabella reveled in travel, keeping elaborate journals of her visits.

Isabella was drawn to the intellectual life of Boston and Cambridge. In 1878, she attended the readings of Charles Eliot Norton, the first professor of art history at Harvard University; he invited her to join the Dante Society. With Norton’s encouragement, she began collecting rare books and manuscripts, beginning with early editions of Dante’s works.

In 1891, after years of collecting on a small, personal scale, Isabella inherited $1.75 million upon her father’s death and was able to begin collecting on a greatly expanded level.

In 1884, Isabella and Jack Gardner first visited the Palazzo Barbaro, a Venetian palace owned by Bostonians Daniel and Ariana Curtis. The palazzo became the gathering place of a group of American and English Expatriates, including the painters John Singer Sargent, James McNeil Whistler, and Ralph Curtis, and the art connoisseur Bernard Berenson. Palazzo Barbaro became a major source of inspiration for Isabella in the creation of her museum in Boston.

Isabella met the charming and intelligent Harvard student Bernard Berenson in 1886. With funds from the Gardners and others, Berenson set off for Florence in 1887 to pursue a literary career but soon discovered his true calling as a connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art. He became Isabella’s chief art advisor, helping her acquire many of the masterpieces in her collection. Berenson wrote of Isabella, “She lives at a rate and intensity, with a reality that makes other lives seem pale, thin, and shadowy.”

Upon purchasing Rembrandt’s Self Portrait, Age 23 in 1896, Isabella and her husband Jack decided their ambitions as collectors required more space than their residence permitted, and first began to consider the idea of a museum. At first, they considered expanding their current home, combining two houses on Beacon Street. However, as Isabella’s collection and ambitions continued to grow, Jack felt it would be more sensible to buy land and build a new building for the museum with apartments for themselves within it.

Jack Gardner died suddenly of a stroke on December 10, 1898. Six weeks later, Isabella Gardner continued with their shared plan to purchase a plot of land in the Fens (Fenway Court) and selected local architect Willard T. Sears, who had done a good bit of work on their home on Beacon Street, to draw up plans for a museum. At the time, there were almost no other buildings in the area.

The influence of the Gardners’ enjoyment while staying at the Palazzo Barbaro is quite evident in the design and construction of the museum. When Jack and Isabella visited in the summer of 1897, they gathered architectural fragments for their eventual gallery, buying columns, windows, and doorways to adorn every floor, as well as reliefs, balustrades, capitals, and statuary from the Roman, Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance periods.

Construction of Isabella’s museum began in 1899 and was completed in late 1901. Willard Sears learned early that Isabella was a challenging employer and meant to play a more active role in the design and the construction than most clients. She continually made changes, insisting that the workmen undo and redo their work, and Sears had to run interference between Isabella and his workers.

In 1901, Isabella moved into the private fourth-floor living quarters and devoted herself to personally arranging works of art in the historic galleries on the first three floors. In 1901 and 1902, Isabella installed her collection of paintings, sculptures, tapestries, furniture, manuscripts, rare books, and decorative arts. She continued to acquire works and change the installations for the rest of her life.

The unsolved theft of 13 works of art that took place on March 18, 1990, continues to plague the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Works by Edgar Degas, Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, and Edouard Manet were taken in the dark of night allegedly by two men posing as police officers who tied up the on-duty security and hastily left with their plunder, cutting paintings out of frames and seeming to have no method to their selection of goods.

There is a $10 million reward for information leading directly to the safe return of the stolen works. Conspiracy theories and tales of secret locations of the artwork
continue to come into the public eye but as of yet, they have produced no results or return of the missing masterpieces.

For more information visit www.gardnermuseum.org/organization/theft

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is located at 25 Evans Way in Boston. For information on the Museum, its hours, and directions, please visit www.gardnermuseum.org. A new book, Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life is now available through the museum shop and online.

 

 

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