I think of Isabella Stewart Gardner in April, when the nasturtiums flow from the courtyard balconies of the villa-museum she created in Boston. She was an inspiring woman, collector and patron of the arts. While at Simmons College, I'd often visit her "Palace" next door, and sit surrounded by art and flowers in the courtyard garden even in winter. Later as a journalist, before the tragic, still unsolved 1990 theft of masterpieces there, I wrote the attached article about the Gardner Museum....
The Gardner Museum: a Bit of Renaissance Spring
By Betsy Showstack Originally published in the Patriot Ledger, Quincy, MA Spring. Renaissance. The courtyard of a Venetian Palazzo, daisies, lemon trees, orchids and camellias. From above, the notes of a piano sonata. Around a corner, down a hall, behind a shadow, under an arch. A frescoed ceiling, a filigree mirror, a piece of lace, tooled leather walls. Then, a masterpiece – by Rembrandt, Giotto or Fra Angelico. Afternoon sunlight reflecting through a glass roof plays with a 16th century painting in a different way than the shadows of cloisters shape a medieval archway. It is an afternoon, not in a European palace, but on the Fenway in Boston, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the city's most individual, and in many ways its best-loved museum. The Gardner is the most individual of museums because it is the single-handed work of the strong-willed and vivacious Mrs. Gardner, who reconstructed in Boston at the turn of the century her own ideal of a 15th-century Venetian palazzo. The Victorian Boston woman spent the last years of her life arranging the almost 2000 pieces of art and artifacts in her collection – a collection dominated by Italian Baroque and Renaissance, a reflection of a life lived in art. The palazzo is a perfect place to imagine the days of an Italian countess, a French king – or as Isabella Stewart Gardner. ____ Mrs. Gardner's traces are everywhere, and that is exactly how the clever woman intended it to be. The museum, which brings Europe to Boston, was left in her will in trust "for the education and enjoyment of the public forever." Forever provided that nothing be rearranged or added to the collection to change her personal and imaginative touch. The drawings, paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles, ceramics and rare books from different periods are not systematically lined up as in the exhausting galleries of many more renowned museums. Rather, Mrs. Gardner used each piece of her collection to play with others around it – to accent, contrast, support: creating with natural expression and sometimes passion. The architecture of the building itself is a remarkable background, and credit is also due to the grand lady for this. Mrs. Gardner planned the reconstruction of a Venetian palace to house her art collection which had outgrown her Beacon Street home in the 1890s. It was her innovative idea to build a museum using architectural fragments from different periods – arches, columns, fireplaces, staircases, window frames, reliefs and balconies – which she had acquired in Europe. She designed Fenway Court, as she called her new museum home, as an Italian palace turned outside in. The Renaissance balconies which once hung over Venetian canals project over a flowering courtyard in Boston. ____ If for nothing else, the museum is exceptional because one woman alone chose the objects, supervised its design and construction, installed the collection, provided funding, and administered the museum, normally the work of a large staff. Born in New York of a family that traced its lineage to the Scottish kings, Isabella Stewart met Jack Gardner, an active Boston businessman and the brother of a schoolmate, while | they were both in Paris. Mrs. Gardner, considered a patroness of the arts, was long an ardent lover of music and a collector of rare books and manuscripts, but it wasn't until 1886 at the age of 46 that she became actively interested in painting and painters. The Gardners spent summers traveling in Italy, where Isabella first started to appreciate the masters of the Italian Renaissance and where she began her splendid collection. Mr. Gardner, who encouraged his wife's interest in the arts, died at about the time his wife started making plans for the museum. The large estates left to Mrs. Gardner by both her husband and earlier, her father, enabled her to create Fenway Court. For those interested in art history, the museum is especially significant for outstanding Renaissance and Baroque collections. Titian's "Rape of Europa," Vermeer's "The Concert" and Botticelli's "Madonna of the Eucharist," as well as masterpieces by Rembrandt, Giotto, Rubens, Raphael, Cellini, della Francesca and Fra Angelico are among the celebrated treasures in the museum. Many of the most valuable paintings and sculpture which Mrs. Gardner acquired were with the advice and assistance of Bernard Berenson, the noted authority on Italian art. After meeting Berenson in an art history class at Harvard, Mrs. Gardner sponsored a year of study for him in Italy, helping him to start his career in art history and philosophy. ____ Other significant paintings in the collection add a more personal touch to the museum and reveal something of the personality of Isabella Gardner: There are several portraits of Mrs. Gardner herself, including two by another friend, John Singer Sargent, who used Fenway Court as a studio one winter. His large portrait of her dominates the Gothic Room and is customarily the last picture, a sort of climax, seen by visitors to the museum. Another portrait, a watercolor sensitively shows Mrs. Gardner wrapped in white two years before her death. The portraits do not reveal a beauty; Mrs. Gardner's rather plain appearance was overshadowed by her dynamic personality. Other portraits of family and friends include those of Mrs. Gardner's husband, grandmother, great grandmother and her friends Matthew Stewart Prichard and violinist-composer Charles Martin Lueffler, who performed at the museum. Several small galleries in the palazzo indicate that Mrs. Gardner was also a patron of contemporary artists including Dégas, Manet, Matisse, Whistler, and of course Sargent. Her collection of letters, photographs and mementos are of little value compared to the paintings of the old masters, but contribute to the intimate surroundings. The courtyard garden, kept in bloom throughout the year, the frequent public concerts and an annual memorial service in a small medieval chapel are also remembrances. Mrs. Gardner herself enjoyed music and flowers at Fenway Court, and in her will she asked that on April 14, her birthday, an Anglican high mass be celebrated in the chapel. "C'est mon plaisir," she said on the museum's seal, a shield bearing a phoenix, the symbol of immortality. And indeed the museum has been a lasting pleasure for all who wish to let the 20th century fade away and visit a place that was one woman's fantasy, a piece of old Italy in Boston, a Venetian palace, a Renaissance spring. *** |