Last week after two days of client meetings in Chestnut Hill, a beautiful suburb outside of Boston, Suzanne’s flight was canceled due to the massive snowstorm! She ended up spending the whole week stuck in Boston, but made the most of it by visiting the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum! The museum contains over 2,500 objects collected by Mrs. Gardner for her home. There is everything from ancient Egyptian sculpture to Matisse paintings, all situated in a palazzo style home. What we love most about this museum is Mrs. Gardner’s daring approach to collecting. The entire museum feels like a cabinet of curiosities full of outstanding treasures!
Image: Boston Magazine
Architect Renzo Piano designed a new 70,000 square foot wing as an addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (above), which opened in 2012. According to museum director Anne Hawley, “We have struggled with the idea that the Gardner Museum is a total work of art … and now Renzo has given us another work of art.” Even Piano himself made sure to pay due respect to such a unique challenge: “It was not an easy job. You cannot compete with magic.”
Image: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Isabella Stewart Gardner purchased the architectural elements, including the Hispano-Moresque window that “frames” the picture, for use in the Spanish Cloister and adjacent chapel in 1906. In 1909 she spent many hours arranging the nearly 2,000 Mexican tiles that had once been the pavement of a church.
At the end of the cloister is John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925), El Jaleo, 1882. Just breathtaking!!
Above: The Yellow Room: Two paintings by James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach, 1895 (left) and Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville, 1865 (right), flanking Edgar Degas, Mme. Gaujelin, 1867 (center).
Image: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
We love this fabulous installation in the Yellow Room, placed by Isabella Gardner.
She actively pursued her purchase of the Whistlers directly with the artist – after asking for his early painting Harmony upon repeated viewings, she finally visited the artist’s studio with his assistant and ordered him to take it off of the wall and down the stairs to her carriage, with Whistler in pursuit! She invited the artist to her hotel for lunch the next day, where he signed it for her c. 1892. Whistler’s Nocturne is a later piece that Isabella Gardner was able to acquire in 1895.
The ballerina and actress Mme. Gaujelin commissioned Degas to paint her portrait in 1867. She later rejected it as unflattering. Today we can appreciate this “sharp and severe” work as a fine example of Degas’s photography-influenced portraiture.
Image: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Collection via wikipedia
This wonderful painting of Isabella Steward Gardner by the Swedish painter Anders Zorn recalls the charming story of her in 1894 who, on the evening of October 20, is perched on the balcony of her Venice home overlooking the Grand Canal, lit by the fireworks display behind her. She exclaimed “Come out – all of you…This is too beautiful to miss!” The artist Zorn was in attendance and at once made a sketch, which later became this painting.
