Isabella Stewart Gardner

Isabella Stewart Gardner 1840-1924, American art collector, b. New York City. She lived in Boston following her marriage to the financier Jack Gardner. After the Civil War her home became known for brilliant social affairs and as a center for gatherings of painters, literary people, musicians, and other celebrities. Her lifelong interest in art led her to sponsor various contemporary artists and the young connoisseur Bernard Berenson , who advised her in the collecting of many works. Her husband cooperated with her in her plan to create an art museum. Fenway Court was built after the Venetian manner to house their valuable collection and was willed to the city of Boston as a public museum to be preserved without change.

Bibliography: See A. Pope and J. D. Hatch, Jr., ed., The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Reproductions of Paintings (1935); M. Carter, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Fenway Court (1925, 2d ed. 1940); L. H. Tharp, Mrs. Jack (1965); D. Shand-Tucci, The Art of Scandal (1997).

Gardner, Isabella [Stewart] (1915–81), Massachusetts‐born poet, whose lively and loving lyrics written in diverse forms appear in Birthdays from the Ocean (1955), The Looking Glass (1961), and the collectionWest of Childhood (1965). Edith Sitwell said, “the poems arise from her personality,” and the author herself said, “they are the poems of a poet who is woman first and poet second…. My poems celebrate and affirm life, but they are also elegiac. My central theme is the …failure of the I–Thou relationship.” She was married to Allen Tate (1959–66) and was an associate editor of Poetry (1952–56).

Gardner, Isabella Stewart (b New York, 14 Apr. 1840; d Boston, 17 July 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 highly 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.