When discussing art and artists, it’s important to also think about the turn-of-the-century women philanthropists who not only supported artists but established galleries and museums where the public could also enjoy their work.
The Bohemienne
One such was Isabella Stewart, an outlier when she came to Boston as a young bride. Although she’d married Jack Gardner, from an old Back Bay family, she couldn’t quite crack the social code. She was considered too “vivid” (she wore blue boots!) to invite to ladies’ teas and sewing circles. Her motto, “C’est mon plaisir,” didn’t convey the modest, retiring personna that was Victorian Boston’s feminine ideal. Left to her own devices, Isabella Stewart Gardner spent her time studying the plants in the Boston Public Garden (the first botanical garden in the U.S.), collecting books, and ultimately, acquiring a vast art collection.
After suffering the loss of a child and another miscarriage, Isabella began to come into her own in the 1880s. Ostracized by her female contemporaries, she built a network of male friends: writer Henry James, artists John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn, and Harvard art history professor Charles Eliot Norton, whose edifying lectures led her to make her first arts purchases, Vermeer’s The Concert and Titian’s The Rape of Europa.
At the approach of the 20th century, America feared it would be weakened by “the feminization of culture,” women monopolizing literature, the fine arts, must, and the theater. Belying this notion, it was newly wealthy Gilded Age industrialists who were ransacking Europe for art and artifacts that would show them to be as cultivated as they were capitalistic.
From Private Collection to Museum
Unlike her male art-collecting counterparts, Isabella was somewhat constrained financially. Although her husband was accommodating, even he didn’t fully understand his flamboyant wife’s voracious appetite for art. When her parents died, Isabella spent her entire inheritance on art purchases. And when she was widowed, a second, larger inheritance allowed her to complete Fenway Court, the Venetian-style villa she’d designed to hold her enormous collection.
On New Year’s Day, 1903, Fenway Court opened to the public. The galleries held 290 paintings, 280 sculptures, and 460 pieces of furniture, among a great many other objects. At a transitional time for women, Isabella Gardner, the only woman among her collecting peers J. Pierpont Morgan, Dr. Albert Barnes, William Corcoran, and William Thompson Walters, played a pivotal role as private collections outgrew their owners’ homes and became the cores of new museums. Certainly her efforts led the way for Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to later establish the Museum of Modern Art (1929) and the Whitney Museum (1930).
Thoughts About the Book
Author Emily Franklin weaves Isabella’s wanting throughout this novel. First, she is seeking to make up for her lack of friendships, then she’s trying to fill the emptiness of losing a child and being unable to have another. Beyond that, she looks for ways to occupy her active mind and to find meaning in her life. “You do so strive and think,” her sister-in-law comments. “How exhausting it must be.” But no, Isabella thinks, “It is wanting that resuscitates us.” It’s clear that this woman isn’t cut out to be a placid and private angel in the house, but she was born too early to be a New Woman. Societal strictures were such that even a woman as privileged as she wasn’t able to find a focus for her life until she was in her forties.
I would have liked to see something in The Lioness of Boston about Isabella’s relationships with New England artists Cecelia Beaux and Lila Cabot Perry. While they were her contemporaries, neither artist is represented in what is now known as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. And why did Isabella dislike Louisine Havemeyer, who held the largest collection of Impressionist art in the U.S.? Competitive jealousy?
This book is an important addition to the history of women in the arts, in that it portrays a museum founder not as a stuffy woman in a pince-nez and pearls, but as a larger than life character. As unafraid to walk a lion on a leash as she was to cultivate the friendships of male artists…and to have them paint scandalous portraits of her, Isabella was as stimulating and satisfying as any work of art.
Suggested Reading
Women’s culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830-1930, Kathleen D. McCarthy