Isabella Stewart Gardner

Isabella Stewart Gardner (April 14, 1840 – July 17, 1924) was an influential American art collector, philanthropist, and patron of the arts whose collection is now housed in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston, Massachusetts.

Isabella Stewart, daughter of David and Adelia (Smith) Stewart, was born in New York City, New York. She married John Lowell "Jack" Gardner, son of John L. and Catharine E. (Peabody) Gardner of Boston, Massachusetts on April 10, 1860 in New York City and thereafter moved to Boston. [Louise Hall Tharp, "Mrs. Jack", Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum 1965] Jack Gardner's grandfather was the distinguished Salem shipowner, Joseph Peabody, who made a fortune importing pepper from Sumatra and was one of the wealthiest men in the United States at the time of his death in 1844.

During her lifetime, the Boston society pages called her many names, including "Belle," "Donna Isabella," "Isabella of Boston," and "Mrs. Jack." Isabella created much fodder for the gossip tabloids of the day with her reputation for stylish tastes and unconventional eccentricities. After she and her husband missed the train to a social engagement, she persuaded the railroad to lend them another for their own personal use. Her surprising appearance at a 1912 concert (at what was then a very formal Boston Symphony) wearing a white headband emblazoned with "Oh, you Red Sox" was reported at the time to have "almost caused a panic", and remains still in Boston one of the most talked about of her eccentricities.

After her husband's death in 1898, Mrs. Gardner began work on her museum. Completed in 1903, the museum was named "Fenway Court" and constructed in the reclaimed swamplands of Boston's Fenway area. Modeled on the Renaissance palaces of Venice, Italy, it was designed by Willard T. Sears, with much direct involvement from Mrs. Gardner, to accommodate the art and architectural artifacts Mrs. Gardner had collected with her husband over many years. The building completely surrounds a glass-covered garden courtyard. The first through third floors were designed to be galleries. The fourth floor of the building was used as living quarters by Isabella Gardner until her death in 1924, and is now used for offices. Mrs. Gardner insisted that the galleries be designed as a palatial home, not a museum, and in the early years after the building was completed she used those floors as such, opening them to the public just 20 days a year.

She died at Fenway Court at age 84, and was buried in the Gardner family tomb at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was a friend of noted artists and writers of the day, including John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Anders Zorn, Henry James, Okakura Kakuzo and Frank Marion Crawford.

The Gardners' art collection

The Gardners were avid travelers and the earliest works in the collection were accumulated from their trips to Europe especially, but also from such places as Egypt, Turkey, and the Far East. But the Gardners began to collect in earnest in the 1880s, rapidly building a world class collection of paintings and statues primarily, but also including tapestries, photographs, silver, ceramics and manuscripts, and architectural elements such as doors, stained glass, and mantelpieces. Nearly 70 works of art in her collection were acquired with the help of dealer Bernard Berenson. Among the collectors with whom she competed was Edward Perry Warren, who supplied a number of works to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The collection includes work by some of Europe's most important artists, such as Botticelli's "Madonna and Child with an Angel", Titian's "Europa", and Raphael's "The Colonna Altarpiece". Mrs. Gardner stipulated that after her death, the museum must be left exactly as she designed it, with each painting and each object in the collection to remain forever in the same place she had put it. Apart from exhibiting the valuable works of art themselves to the public, the museum continues to showcase the strong stamp of its original collectors, Jack and Isabella Gardner.

In 1990 the Museum had a major [http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/arttheft/northamerica/us/isabella/isabella.htm theft] . Art thieves dressed up as Boston policemen tied up the security guards at night, and proceeded to walk off with 13 works of art, including "The Concert" by Vermeer, five sketches by Degas, and three works by Rembrandt, including "Storm on the Sea of Galilee," his only known seascape. The works have not been recovered, and the FBI is still investigating the matter.

References

External links

* [http://www.gardnermuseum.org/ Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum]
* [http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=2838 Isabella Gardner's Gravesite]
* [http://www.gardnertheft.com Gardner Theft]