1920: John Singer Sargent's icon-like image, Mrs. Gardner in White.
A century and more ago, in cities from Cleveland to New York, to Boston and beyond, America's great municipal public art collections were formed. Reflecting the artistic sensibilities of rich patrons, these institutions were old-fashioned examples of paternalistic philanthropy. Dividends of industrial might, they were meant to enlighten and edify masses unable to experience European culture first hand.
1907
Nowhere was this more true than at Isabella Stewart Gardner's privately established and funded art collection. Among the world's most distinctive and moving museums, it quite literally reproduced a private art-filled palace. And it is a rather personal and idiosyncratic palace at that, perfectly plain, even Spartan, without, and so, inside, all the more sumptuous, due to unrivaled art riches. True enough Henry Clay Frick, on the whole, formed a collection with a greater nuber of more superlative masterpieces. Only, how far more exciting to devise, out of a mixture with lesser and mismatched but related bits, a splendid entity that brilliantly fits together. In its palace guise, the Gardner's art gallery was inspired by renowned museums in Europe's capitals, which had evolved from collections embellishing the lofty apartments of royal and aristocratic residences which gradually came to be opened to the public. Mrs. Gardner, working with architect Willard T. Sears, conceived of Fenway Court in much the same way. So it was rather like a Grand Duchess or a Marchioness, as opposed to a museum curator or bureaucrat, that Mrs. Gardner amassed, displayed, enjoyed and shared the riches of her spectacular collection.
The Court
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum opened to the public on the evening of January 1, 1903, with a concert on a cold snowy night in early winter. Prformed by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, it included selections by Bach, Mozart, Chausson and Schumann. Afterward, mirrored doors rolled back revealing the courtyard. Brimming with tropical palms, with brightly colored and sweetly scented flowers, it was poetically lighted with Japanese lanterns. William James who was there, remembered, "The aesthetic perfection of all things seemed to have a peculiar effect on the company…It was a very extraordinary and wonderful moral influence…Quite in the line of a Gospel miracle!"
Like many wealthy Americans, Mr. and Mrs. John L. Gardner acquired paintings and art objects to decorate their houses. In the 1880's, Isabella Stewart Gardner attended lectures on art history and readings of Dante given by Charles Eliot Norton at Harvard College. This sparked a passion for Dante, and Isabella Gardner began to buy rare editions by the writer. In expanding her areas of interest to include art, what remains so remarkable about the self possessed Mrs. Gardner, is how she gathered the bulk of her collection in a quite short period of time. Equally remarkable is that she was able to obtain some of the most extraordinary art then available, utilizing a fortune ample enough for you or me perhaps, especially given the generous purchasing power of the dollar then, but one minuscule when compared with the means of the most serious collectors of her time. That she was able become a serious collector of Dutch and Italian pictures by the 1890's, was due to her shrewdness in relying on expert and informed advice.
The Monk's Garden at Fenway Court.
One reason for being so exacting was the Gardners' determination to inaugurate a museum. By 1896, Isabella and Jack Gardner recognized that their house at 152 Beacon Street in Boston's Back Bay, although enlarged once, was hardly commodious enough for them to realize this ambition. Before Mrs. Jack finally settled on building in the Fenway, close enough to the MFA to constitute an informal division, they had contemplated erecting a completely new museum building on the same site of their old house.
At any rate, beginning in 1894, Bernard Berenson, then a young unknown, started to recommend Italian paintings to his friend, the affable and adventurous Mrs. Jack. He was just as new at this as she was, but even so, within two years he had guided Mrs. Gardner towards a collection that included Botticelli's Lucretia, Vermeer's The Concert, and Rembrandt's Self-Portrait!
1906: Isabella Stewart Gardner, by Baron Adolph de Meyer.
Their frequent sojourns through Asia, the Middle East, and Europe fostered for the Gardners' an appreciation for different cultures readily apparent in the museum they envisioned together. Where, in a more conventional art institution, collections are organized and presented systematically, grouped together stylistically, by epoch and country of origin, just as at Vizcaya, at Fenway Court, more catholic assemblages prevailed. This is the case, notwithstanding Fenway Court's thematic disposition of cloisters, corridors and rooms. Pioneer woman reporter and suffragist, Miss Annie O'Hagan, writing in Munsey's Magazine, in March of 1906, attributed such designations to Fenway Court being so authentically Venetian. "All the rooms at Fenway Court are purely Italian. They are called by distinguishing names, just as apartments in Italian palaces were and are called, corresponding to the chief feature of their decoration..." Most romantically named was Mrs. Gardner's sitting room of preference, the now lost Chinese Room. How out of the ordinary that a space called "the Chinese Room" would not only contain Japanese screens and scrolls, but a Renaissance cassone, European as well as monochrome Chinese porcelain and lacquered Rococo Venetian chairs. These chairs in turn, still incongruously, remain on the first floor at the head of the stairs, in the Early Italian Room.
The Chinese Room.
In this new incarnation, not only were oriental ornaments relocated, so was the one object most un-supportive of the Chinese Room designation, that nonetheless, counted unarguably as its 'chief feature'. Anders Zorn's Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice, was completed in 1894. In a small way it has attracted excited attention ever since. Painted in the Palazzo Barbaro, the portrait captures the moment when the visual sensualist Mrs. Jack, watching fireworks from a balcony, turns and stands in the window smiling with delight at the spectacle. Her arms widely outstretched, she is extending an invitation to her guests, 'Come, join me!', she seems to beckon. It's obvious that the pleasure she's experiencing is wonderful and marvelous.
1894: Anders Zorn's Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice.
How prophetic that painting this vivid likeness of the spirited Mrs. Jack, that Zorn should have captured her in the very gesture which so characterizes her creative vision of Fenway Court. It was a discerning woman to be sure, who loved humanity enough to turn the sorrow of losing her only child into a life-long project to do what good she could, to better her world with beauty. To this end she visited the construction site of her new-old palace regularly. Carefully supervising every detail of the building, even climbing ladders to show painters the effect she sought for the interior courtyard's roseate stucco, Mrs. Jack also summoned wet bed-sheets to inform plasterers of how she wished a bas-relief in the Music Room to appear.
One person alone selected the disparate parts of her creation and that being too determined the placement of each architectural remnant, each sofa, flower and painting, which, however fine or mundane, coalesced to form a unique work of art. One sometimes hears fellow pilgrims, amidst the Gardner's glory, complain of the dark. Forget about cell phones and i-Pads, how did we exist, without perishing, before electric lighting? Teaching us to again adjust our eyes to appreciate radiance emanating out of surrounding gloom, how like a Venetian fireworks display is Mrs. Jack's magical collection. In a flash, as sunshine streams into a window, to fall upon and throw into high relief, a carefully placed painting, one immediately recognizes a masterpiece of fame and familiarity, one which had gone quite unnoticed the moment before.
Certainly conservation concerns are legitimate enough to make even the most ardent, willingly compromise an ideal. But is it really reasonable to accept that this is what has happened at Isabella Stewart Gardner's Palace of Art? How was it and on what basis, that in March 2009, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that the proposed project to alter, disfigure and re-orient Fenway Court, was 'consistent with the primary intent of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s will and in the public interest'? How did Boston's celebrated Landmarks Commission review and approved the Museum’s plans for new construction under the Accelerated Design Review process from 2008 through 2011? Reflecting on all that Mrs. Gardner sought to accomplish, and all the intrusive self-aggrandizing alterations imposed here, I cannot believe the one thing that matters most when contemplating a drastic change to a work of art, would the artist, the benevolent but imperious and independent Isabella Stewart Gardener approve of the change? Mrs. Jack would not have.
Nor does it seem likely that she would have so sanguinely countinenced the irresponsible loss of some of her finest pictures. As with Wall Street's most wayward bankers, too often today it seems that the consequence of folly is a reward, encouraging still more recklessness, if only as a distraction.
1904: Fenway Court's acoustically perfect Music Room was divided horozontally in 1915. Repacling it downstairs were the Spanish and Chinese Cloisters and upstairs a new concert hall, the Tapestry Gallery.
A phalanx of piping herms, draperies in low relief, Della Robbia singers and Corienthian columns decorated Mrs. Jack's chaste Music Room
.
Fenway Court opened in 1903 with a concert on a cold snowy night in early winter. Afterward mirrored doors rolled back revealing the courtyard brimming with tropical palms, with brightly colored, sweetly scented flowers, all poetically lighted with Japanese lanterns.
William James, remembered, "The aesthetic perfection of all things seemed to have a peculiar effect on the company…It was a very extraordinary and wonderful moral influence…Quite in the line of a Gospel miracle!"
The Spanish Cloister
the Chinese Cloister was once charmingly embowered by trailing ivy.
1916: Fenway Court's new Tapestry Gallery.
Had he done nothing more, by one action art historian Bernard Berenson secured the fame of the Gardners as collectors. In 1896, he facilitated the purchase of Titian's magnificent Rape of Europa, one of the most sublime masterpieces of all time. It was one of a group of paintings showing romances of the gods that Titian painted for Philip II of Spain in the mid-16th-Century. In Metamorphoses Ovid describes the same scene of Jupiter abducting Europa, which the superlative High Renaissance Venetian master depicts with such shimmering lusciousness. Who doesn't recognize that look of utter innocence in the bull's eyes? 'Please trust me', he seems to say, 'I would never hurt you.' The silver-shot pale-green brocade hung below the picture was salvaged from a favorite gown of Mrs. Gardner's made by Charles Worth.
Jove put down his heavy scepter: the great father, great ruler of the gods, whose right hand wields triple-forked lightning, and whose awful nod makes the word tremble, put aside his might, his majesty, and took upon himself the form of a bull…And he, the lover, gave kisses to hands held out, rejoicing in hope of later, more exciting kisses… And he rises, ever so gently, and slowly edges from the dry sand toward the water, further and further, and swimming now, with the girl, trembling a little and looking back to the land, her right hand clinging tight to one horn, and the other resting easy along the shoulder, and her flowing garments filling and fluttering in the breath of the sea-wind.
As to Titian's magnificent Rape of Europa having a pronounced crease down the center, something never referred to, in a letter from December 6, 1554 King Philip complains about how 'due to improper shipping, a vertical fold is visible!'
A double stairway in the court of Mrs. Gardner's palace led to her Dutch Room. Hung with legendary masterworks, it was also hung with both moire, damask, tapestry and embroidered panels.
In her portrait, down-graded since Gardner's purchase, from Murillo, to Studio of Antonis Mor, 'Bloddy' Mary Tudor is wearing the 16thCentury La Peregrina Pearl. A present from her consort, Philip II of Spain, the pearl was latter owned Dame Elizabeth Taylor and worn on a jeweled necklace. At December's sale of the late star's ornaments, it realized a staggering $11.8 million. It was at the start of Mary and Philip's ill-fated-marriage that Titian painted Rape of Europa for his Most Catholic Majesty.
Jan Vermeer's lost The Concert.
The Raphael Room is hung with a cardinal's banners against drafts, a patchwork of rich textiles and incomparable artworks.
Is not the Small Salon the most exquisite of Fenway Court's treasure rooms?
No, the most exquisite room must be the Veronese Room, with polychromatic leather hangings and diminutive and delicate Whistler drawings, juxtaposed with works by Guardi, Tiepolo, and of course, Veronese.
The former Chinese Room is now the Early Italian Room.
Paved in tiny tiles still manufactured in Pennsylvania at Henry Chapman Mercer's Moravian Pottery and Tile Works, the somewhat ascetic Gothic Room was not opened during Mrs. Jack's lifetime.
1888: Mrs. Gardner loved her superior portrait by John Singer Sargent, more so as it had caused a mild sensation when exhibited shortly after its completion at conventional Boston's St. Botolph Club. Withdrawn from the show of Sargent's works by her husband, it was never shown again and hence the Gothic Room, during Mrs. Jack's lifetime, was not opened.
Banked by fragrant madonna lilies, Sargent's portrait stood near four angel-form Renaissance candle sticks from the Gardner's Beacon Street Sitting Room. Great art, like great love, endures.
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