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Isabella Stewart Gardner, by John Singer Sargent, 1888, oil on canvas, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, 1924 Bequest of Isabella Stewart Gardner

By Patricia H. Svoboda, Research Coordinator, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery.
Reprinted with permission.

s collectors, patrons, and museum where students and artists could interact with the objects and be
founders, American women have played inspired by the designs.
Aan influential role in national and A few years later, in 1903, Isabella Stewart Gardner opened
international art circles from the late her Boston mansion, Fenway Court, to the public. Isabella
nineteenth century until today. With the Stewart was married to the prominent banker and civic leader
rise of first-wave feminism, women John Lowell Gardner, who shared her interest in art collecting
acquired greater financial independence and traveling. After his death in 1898, she carried out their
and access to education and professional plans to build a private museum in the style of a Venetian
careers. They also gained confidence in palace with an inner garden courtyard. In her last will, she
visiting galleries and museums and instructed that Fenway Court (now the Isabella Stewart
participating in cultural organizations. In Gardner Museum) would be for “the education and enjoy-
turn, women commissioned and acquired ment of the public forever.”
fine art and decorative objects directly from
the artists, or through dealers and commer-
cial galleries. Some even went on to found
museums in an effort to share their
collections with broader audiences.
From the 1890s to the 1920s, these female
patrons were quintessential “New Women.” The
author Henry James popularized the term, which Portrait of Sarah Cooper
Hewitt in French
referred to the growing number of feminists who Costume, by J. Carroll
made their presence felt in cultural, educational, Beckwith, 1899, pastel
and political groups. Active in the suffragist crayon on paper
cause, they exhibited their art collections to raise mounted on linen
funds for the movement. In honor of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design
Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, New York, Bequest of Erskine
Hewitt
Initiative, which celebrates the centennial of
women’s suffrage in the United States, this study
of female collectors, patrons, and museum founders highlights the
women who made a substantial impact on the cultural advancement of
their generations.
More than one of the
Smithsonian Institution’s twenty-
one museums owes its existence to
some of the earliest women
founders. In 1897, sisters Eleanor
Garnier Hewitt and Sarah Cooper
Hewitt opened the Museum for
the Arts of Decoration (now
the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian
Design Museum) in New York.
Their grandfather Peter Cooper was Isabella Stewart Gardner, by Anders Leonard Zorn, 1894, etching on paper,
the industrialist and inventor who National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
had established the Cooper Union
for the Advancement of Science and Ultimately, Isabella Stewart Gardner amassed a collection of nearly
Art, a free school for adults, in 3,000 objects that includes fine and decorative art from America,
1853. The Hewitt sisters founded Europe, and Asia. Its treasures span classical antiquity and the
their museum as part of Cooper Renaissance to the modern art of her own day. Not only did she collect
Union and curated its collection of art, but she also supported the influential art historian Bernard
Eleanor Garnier Hewitt, by drawings, prints, textiles, furniture, Berenson, who advised her collecting practice. She was also a patron of
Antonia de Bañuelos, 1888, and decorative art objects, which the artists James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and Anders
oil on canvas, they had acquired in the United Zorn, who created remarkable portraits of her. Zorn’s first commission
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, States and Europe. They aimed to from Gardner is an 1894 etching that depicts her seated in an Italian
New York, Bequest of Erskine Hewitt
create a “practical working laboratory,” “scabello” armchair, which appears to merge in the shadow of an
14 Journal of Antiques and Collectibles