Gardner, Isabella Stewart

Gardner, Isabella Stewart (1840–1924). American socialite and art collector. She married into a prominent Boston family and spent most of her life in that city, where she patronized numerous artistic causes (including the Boston Symphony Orchestra) and dazzled and occasionally mildly scandalized polite society (for example by attending boxing matches). Her interest in art was guided by Bernard Berenson, one of her protégés, who helped her to assemble a superb collection of Italian Renaissance paintings, including Titian's Rape of Europa, which has often been claimed as the greatest painting in America. Other highlights of her collection include some outstanding 17th-century Dutch paintings and her full-length portrait (1888) by Sargent (to whom she had been introduced in London by Henry James). The portrait shows off her celebrated figure (she wears her pearls round her waist rather than her neck) and was considered rather shocking —in the spirit of Sargent's earlier Madame X (some contemporaries assumed that he and Mrs Gardner were lovers, but this seems unlikely). Her husband, the financier Jack Gardner, died in 1898, and the following year she began building Fenway Court in Boston as both a home and a museum. The building, which was formally opened in 1903, is modelled on a Venetian Renaissance palace and incorporates various architectural fragments that she bought on her numerous trips to Europe. She supervised the construction with immense care, acting virtually as site foreman. In her will she left the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to Boston as a public institution, with the proviso that the collection should be maintained exactly as she had arranged it. The British art historian Sir Philip Hendy, who published a catalogue of the Gardner Museum in 1931, described it as ‘probably the finest collection of its compact size in the world’. In addition to paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints, it contains objects of many other types, including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glassware, manuscripts, and books.