The Gilded Age
The life of Isabella Stewart Gardner is a tribute to the power of art.
BRIGHT, IMPETUOUS AND obsessed with beautiful things, Isabella Stewart Gardner led a life out of a Gilded Age novel. Born into a wealthy New York family, she married into an even wealthier Boston one when she wed John Lowell Gardner in 1860, only to be ostracized by her adopted city’s more conservative denizens, who found her self-assurance and penchant
CHASING BEAUTY
The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner
By Natalie Dykstra
Mariner. 502 pp. $37.50.
for “jollification” a bit much.
Belle, as she was known, thought nothing of bringing home lion cubs from the zoo to show off at teatime, or of taking a younger lover. The necklines of her couture dresses were low; her trademark rope of pearls — a gift from her devoted (and long-suffering) husband — hung nearly to her knees. Society columnists struck a tone of derisive admiration: One 1894 profile marveled at Gardner’s magnetism, given that her face was “almost destitute of those lines of beauty” appreciated at the time.
Gardner cast a mold for ultrawealthy bohemianism, leaving behind the kind of legacy few Bostonians could match in Fenway Court (now known as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), the palazzo-inspired Gesamtkunstwerk she designed largely herself. She filled it with Old Masters, rare manuscripts and objets d’art. Inviting Boston’s elite to the 1903 opening reception, she greeted them like subjects, serving champagne and doughnuts to the strains of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
A portrait both of a lady and of a glittering era, Natalie Dykstra’s “Chasing Beauty” draws from Gardner’s travelogues, scrapbooks and few surviving letters to track her subject’s expanding sensibilities as an art collector. Dykstra, the author of an acclaimed biography of Clover Adams, astutely situates her subject within Gardner’s growing web of connections: expatriates, artists and scholars.
Privilege didn’t inure the Gardners to tragedy: In 1865, their toddler son, John III, died of pneumonia. Belle’s grief metastasized into severe depression when, following a miscarriage, she was told not to make further attempts to have children. When a doctor suggested she travel abroad, Belle was so frail that she had to be carried onto the boat on a cot. (Ten years later, they would take over guardianship of their three nephews after Jack’s brother, Joe, shot himself; his wife had died in childbirth.)
Among her longstanding friendships was one with Henry James, who may have based several characters on her, wrote her obsequious letters and gossiped
Among her longstanding friendships was one with Henry James.
about her behind her back — though he was socially generous, introducing her to John Singer Sargent.
Sargent painted two extraordinary portraits of Gardner, the first of which depicts her head-on, wasp-waisted and a little bosomy in a black dress — so risqué, in the context of puritanical Boston, that it was hung in Jack’s private office. After Fenway Court opened, Sargent became its first artist in residence.
Gardner became serious about collecting after attending the impassioned lectures of Charles Eliot Norton, Harvard’s first professor of art history. Norton took Gardner’s intellectual curiosities seriously, advising her to invest in art and rare manuscripts rather than couture and jewels. “He knew, as Belle was beginning to know, how beauty can meet loss, how aesthetic experience assuages,” Dykstra writes, noting that Norton was mourning the death of his wife.
At an 1892 Paris auction, Gardner made her first major acquisition: Vermeer’s 1664 painting “The Concert.” When Gardner brought the painting home, it was only the second Vermeer in the United
States and the first in Boston. (Stolen in a notorious 1990 heist, it has never been recovered.)
With the help of Bernard Berenson, the Renaissance specialist, she procured her first Botticelli in 1894; two years later, Berenson helped her obtain Titian’s “The Rape of Europa,” which Rubens had called “the greatest painting in the world.”
After Jack’s 1898 death, Gardner focused her energy on Fenway Court’s construction, modeling the museum after Venice’s Palazzo Barbaro — though she and her architect, Willard T. Sears, placed the arches and balustrades around a central courtyard garden, effectively turning the palazzo inside out.
As Dykstra tells it, Gardner never lost her desire to know more; her growing interest in Impressionism led her to purchase portraits by Manet and Degas, and she badgered friends to introduce her to Monet. Eventually she obtained an early Matisse, the first in an American collection.
Like other wealthy American collectors, Gardner delighted in the thrill of the hunt — and part of the pleasure of this exquisitely detailed and perceptive biography is in imagining which Vermeer we might have bid on in Gardner’s bejeweled shoes, or where in our own homes we’d hang the Rembrandt.
But its deeper revelations have more to do with Gardner’s emerging attunement to the emotional affirmation to be found in art — its joys and consolations, the pleasures of sharing those experiences. And as Gardner (intentionally) left few written traces of her inner life, this is a real feat of biography.
What gives art real power, after all, isn’t its moneyed visionaries, but its ability to inspire impassioned encounters in all of us. And while Gardner, largely alone in her fortress of priceless objects in her later years, strikes a poignant figure, there’s a sense of invincibility, too. In her will, Gardner mandated that nothing could be rearranged in the museum’s galleries; in the end, no one else’s judgment mattered but her own.