Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) once confided to a friend that “the greatest need in our country was art. We were a very young country and had few opportunities of seeing beautiful things ... So, I determined to make it my life’s work if I could”. Born to a wealthy New York family, she had the kind of cosmopolitan education experienced by the happy few of her class—people like her friends the novelist Henry James, the historian Henry Adams and the painter John Singer Sargent. Indeed, her story reads like the plot outline of one of James’s novels in which new-world idealism is often compromised by the old world. Fortunately, Gardner had resources that fictional heroines did not possess: a deep familiarity with European and Far Eastern culture as well as strong opinions and the money to back them up.
Natalie Dykstra’s new biography sets out to capture the extraordinary story of a generous philanthropist who sought to bring art to her adopted city of Boston. The museum that bears her name was the fruit of a long and often lonely struggle to achieve her vision at a time when most of the US was “Sahara-like” in cultural terms. Isabella’s greatest asset was her supportive and financially secure husband John Lowell Gardner Jr. Their marriage in 1860 introduced her—or “Mrs Jack” as she became known—to the upper echelons of Boston society. However, Isabella’s forceful personality and desire to do more than make calls and join sewing circles alienated Boston’s social elite. She was considered “fast” and often complained that there was “not a charitable eye or ear in Boston”.
Collecting culture
The great tragedy of the couple’s life was the death of their infant son Jackie, for which travel proved an antidote (see the book review of Fellow Wanderer in The Art Newspaper, April 2023).
Isabella’s travels and wide interests became a source of strength when she began to navigate the treacherous world of art. One of her early mentors, the Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton, encouraged her to collect “culture”, but that was not straightforward. Even well-educated people like the Gardners were at the mercy of dealers and advisers, and their relationship with Bernard Berenson was as complex as it was successful. Isabella had sponsored Berenson’s early studies of art in Italy, and he came back into her life years later as a mentor, steering important paintings her way.
Berenson acquired some of the glories of the collection: Titian’s Rape of Europa (1560-62), arguably the finest Titian in the Americas, as well as works by Botticelli, Rembrandt and others. Isabella stuck with Berenson, even when her husband discovered that he was overcharging them, perhaps because she realised that she needed his expertise and connections more than the odd thousand dollars. Still, not all her triumphs were Berenson’s; her purchase of Vermeer’s The Concert (around 1664) in 1892 was down to her own instincts.
Long before her museum had taken shape, Isabella collected artists as well as art. She set about to fashion her own image, and in Sargent and the Swedish painter Anders Zorn she found kindred spirits. Sargent’s full-length portrait of Isabella in 1888 showed her standing boldly in front of a red and gold tapestry, the décolleté of her black dress complemented by ropes of pearls around her waist. Isabella must have wanted the painter to recreate something like his scandalous Madame X, which caused a stir in Paris in 1884. The vagueness of the sitter’s features was deliberate, and Sargent cruelly remarked to a friend that Isabella had a face like a lemon with a slit for a mouth. The portrait elicited such negative comments in Boston that Jack Gardner refused to let it be seen in public during his lifetime.
A substantial inheritance from her father in 1891 enabled Isabella to consider a permanent home for her art and library of rare editions. She chose the marshy land of Fenway Court in Boston’s Back Bay. She wanted to have her own Venetian palazzo there, filling galleries labelled “Gothic”, “Spanish”, “Chinese” and “Dutch”, among others, with her “spoils”. Architectural salvage, textiles and stained glass convey the impression of period rooms that were in favour in the houses of the wealthy at the turn of the 20th century. The focal point was the glazed atrium, a breathtaking souvenir of Venice with gothic arcading amid a profusion of plants and trailing flowers. At its opening in 1903, Mrs Jack sat regally upon a chair while receiving the homage of Boston Society. It had taken a long time, but now this “millionaire Bohémienne” was accepted by her peers and even referred to as “one of the seven wonders of Boston”.
Dykstra’s biography may lack the critical edge of Anne Higonnet’s A Museum of One’s Own (2009), but it is an empathetic and sensitive portrait of the Sphinx of Fenway Court.
• Natalie Dykstra, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Mariner Books, 512pp, $37.50/£25 (hb), published 26 March/11 April
• Bruce Boucher’s latest book, John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities (Yale), was published in June 2024