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I’ve posted earlier on my five favorites from the Gardner Museum (see here), but those were chosen from artworks I found on the Net. In August 2020, I visited the Gardner for the first time in decades.

Short history of the Gardner

The  Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a few blocks from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Isabella Stewart (b. 1840), daughter of a wealthy New York merchant, grew up in Manhattan and Paris and married Jack Gardner, a wealthy Bostonian. In 1891, with a bequest of $1.75 million from her father, Isabella and Jack began collecting art on a major scale. Modeled on a Venetian palazzo, the building they designed to house their collection includes a memorable courtyard with Roman, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance elements.

Jack died before the building was complete. Isabella, who installed living quarters for herself at the top of the building, arranged the collection personally before the museum opened to the public in 1903. When Isabella died in 1924, she left orders that the building and her arrangement of art were not to be altered. A few upgrades have been made – notably an alarm system, and shades to protect works from the sun – but the Gardner museum remains very much a reflection of its creator’s eccentric interests.

The Gardner state of mind

Visiting the Gardner requires a different mindset than other museums. It’s a very personal collection that includes not just the usual painting and sculpture, but a huge assortment of tapestries, textiles, decorative ironwork, fireplaces, books and autographs, and architectural elements. Their points of origin range from Europe to the Far East. In accordance with Isabella’s wishes, the items on display are not sorted by time or place and have no labels.

I love thinking about art into its historical context … but that’s not an easy thing to do at the Gardner. So I wandered about just taking photos of objects that interested me or that I liked. Sometimes I could figure out what they were from the Gardner’s website: sometimes not!

Ground-floor courtyard

The Gardners designed the building to face a courtyard. (Once open to the sky, it’s now protected by a skylight.) Perhaps because I’ve been so cooped up due to Covid-19, I’ve lately begun to appreciate gardens. The Gardner has a lovely one in its courtyard. Look at the variation in color, height, and texture. Whoever’s in charge of this garden is a master.

The courtyard includes several pieces of ancient sculpture and a Roman mosaic. It’s surrounded by a cloister (a covered walkway), off which open several rooms with Chinese, medieval, and nineteenth-century paintings.

One of the Gardner’s most famous paintings is John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo, 1882. For a better image and comments on the subject, see my post Five Favorites at the Gardner. The photo below gives you a sense of the scale, and also of the eclectic design of the museum: a nineteenth-century American painting is flanked by objects from Mexico, Egypt, Spain, Italy, Iran, Turkey (see this list).

Columns atop lions were often used in Italy at the entrances to churches. The Gardner has an un-matched pair.

This sarcophagus in the photo below is very similar to the Dionysus sarcophagus at the Metropolitan Museum, which I used in Innovators in Sculpture to illustrate the conventions adopted for narrative reliefs among the Romans: repetition of faces, poses, proportions, and little suggestion of depth. All the figures seem to be trying to be in the front row for a photo op.

A few steps away from the Roman sarcophagus: a pillar with Moorish designs and Arabic inscriptions, ca. 1475. Since Muslim artists weren’t allow to represent living beings, they became adept at intricate ornamentation.

I have no idea what those pillars are. Bugs me. Naumkeag in Stockbridge had similar pillars modeled on Venetian pillars for gondolas … could that be it?

Almost certainly a Roman copy of a Classical Greek sculpture.

Archaic Greek sculpture, perhaps late 6th century BC.

Rooms next to the cloister and courtyard

I love the way the light passes through the woman’s hair in this work by Howard Gardiner Cushing. The Shower of Gold, 1908, is in the Blue Room on the ground floor.

The colors, the light, the textures: I grew up on a farm, but our meadows never looked like this. This was one of my five favorites at the Gardner, but it’s so badly lit (in the Blue Room) that I barely recognized it! Much better photo here.

Another painting from my five favorites post: better image here.

EIghteenth-century Italian mirror reflecting a twentieth-century sculpture of Diana by Paul Manship, in the Macknight Room.

Onward and upward! Next week: some objects from the upper floors.

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