Between entertaining guests and nonstop bargaining, the frenetic activity took its toll on the fifty-seven-year-old. On August 29 she was in great pain, couldn’t stand up straight, and was convinced she was having a heart attack. But the Festa of the Madonna of San Stefano was taking place that day, a spectacle she could not miss. Belle prayed to the Madonna and when the statue passed by, the pain miraculously vanished, as she and her maid told Belle’s first biographer, Morris Carter. The next day she hired a boat, had a piano carried on board, and had her guests—the composer Clayton Johns and the well-known singer Theodore Byard—perform for her as they floated along the canal. Like Cleopatra on her barge.
Back in Boston, Belle received a steady stream of “gondola gossip” from Ralph Curtis at the Palazzo Barbaro. He also kept his eyes and ears open for treasures she might want. Writing from a yacht off the coast of Naples he addressed an April 1894 note to “My dear Queen Isabella,” mentioning a fifteenth-century Persian carpet she might like. As for news from Venice, he added, “The Crown Princess of Sweden wants the Barbaro but she can’t have it now,” and ended with, “Ever your faithful slave.” And then a “P.S.”—“These boys want us to go in the boat to the coronation of the Tsar—!??” Such was expatriate life at the top of the food chain. Small wonder that Belle eventually decided to recreate the Palazzo Barbaro in gloomy Boston.
The year 1898 began badly and ended even worse for the Gardners. In February, Belle broke her leg, an event that made headlines in the New York Tribune: “Boston Society Leader Breaks Leg but Won’t Tell How.” Even her doctor was sworn to secrecy. F. Marion Crawford, her former inamorato, wrote to offer his sympathy that she should be “laid on the shelf like a plaster cast of the Venus of Medici.” Though much of Boston society heaved a sigh of relief that she might be out of commission for a while, she surprised them all, venturing out in a wheelchair in midwinter and taking in a performance of Lohengrin from the stage wings. Town Topics reported that within two months of her injury, the nearly sixty-year-old Belle was seen making a dramatic entrance into another theater performance. As she intended, all eyes were drawn to her entourage. A footman in livery preceded her with a cushion for her foot. Then the star attraction, Belle, dressed in black with a “water-melon pink toque,” walked down the aisle leaning heavily on the arm of her escort, a handsome man half her age. It was George Proctor, the former prodigy she’d been supporting for years. Though he never developed into the world-class pianist she expected, he more than fulfilled his role and continued to receive ample checks from her. He fawned over Belle and fed her vanity. She needed flirtatious young men around her as much as she needed her art.
The art treasures Belle was continuing to collect gathered dust in warehouses in various corners of the globe, awaiting the creation of her showplace. But what form should the museum take? Belle and Jack disagreed over that question. Belle wanted to follow through with the plan their architect, Willard Sears, had drawn up to replace their home on Beacon Street. But Jack thought the street, with its row of houses cheek by jowl, was too crowded for such a new structure. He preferred the idea of a freestanding building in an open space where light could stream through the windows on all sides. Apparently, Jack and Belle had just looked at a parcel of land that might serve that purpose—it was in a deserted area known as the Fens, a marshy backwater then being drained and filled in. During a dinner at the Gardners’ house in the early fall of 1898, twenty-two-year-old Corinne Putnam (soon to be married to the Boston artist Joseph Lindon Smith) witnessed her hosts bickering about where the museum should be sited. Belle told Jack that if light was the problem, she might just “invent a new system of lighting.” Corinne had never met Belle before, and she was so taken by her hostess’s self-assurance and determination that anything seemed possible.
Two months later, on December 10, 1898, Jack suffered a stroke at the Exchange Club on Milk Street. Carried back to their home on Beacon Street, he died that night at the age of sixty-one. Belle covered his coffin with a purple pall she had bought in Italy and had a cross of violets, grown in her own greenhouse, laid atop it.
Belle inherited over two million dollars from Jack in two separate trusts from which she drew a sizable yearly income. With the larger trust she also had the right to draw upon the principal. Conservative Bostonians shook their heads in disbelief: allowing an extravagant woman like Belle to draw upon the principal? She’d surely blow through her entire fortune. But she didn’t. This was, after all, a rather large fortune in those days (not robber baron quality, but substantial nonetheless). Belle also still received income from her father’s bequest. And she was very shrewd.
Jack had actively encouraged Belle’s collecting obsession. He paid the bills, but he also provided ballast in her life. She seemed to outrage everyone in Boston except her husband. There was no stopping her, so perhaps he just tried to stay out of her way—and not to overhear the gossip about her. Belle burned many of her personal papers, so there’s no written record of her grief. As happened after the deaths of her son and her nephew, she suffered her loss in a deep silence. She withdrew from the public for an extended time period and in a manner that exceeded traditional mourning customs. She stopped inviting close friends to her home for dinner. Her seclusion became such a source of concern that one acquaintance organized a concert at Belle’s home—with only Belle in attendance. When she finally did emerge in public, she covered her face with a veil that fell nearly to the ground. Deemed “Boston’s most interesting widow,” a February 1899 newspaper article reported that Belle had been seen “enveloped in the heaviest crêpe from head to foot, in a Russian sleigh hung with sable robes and with coachman and footman in irreproachable mourning livery.”
Rumors spread that she’d suffered a nervous breakdown. It wasn’t true. With laser-like focus she turned her attention to her museum. In fact, within weeks of her husband’s death she summoned her architect, Willard Sears, requested minor revisions for the new museum building that was to replace her Beacon Street house, and directed him to proceed with the construction as soon as possible. The following day she summoned him back. Scrap the plans, she told him; she’d just purchased a plot of land in the Fens, honoring Jack’s wish.
Belle had a new world to conquer. The Fens was a vast stretch of empty landfill where she could create whatever she fancied. Her ego—once described as “cosmic and insatiable”—demanded an outsized, exuberant project. She turned her back on the counting house coldness of Back Bay mansions, an architectural aesthetic that was so very smug, so very parochial, so very Boston. It was an aesthetic that prided itself on restraint and avoiding ostentation (no matter what it might cost to attain that pinched look).
In the process of creating her vision, she drove her architect nearly mad. Sears was less the architect than the draftsman revising one blueprint after the next to fulfill Belle’s dream. While she wanted to create a palace based on the Palazzo Barbaro, she wanted to build it in reverse. In Venice, the exteriors of palazzi are virtual wedding cakes of ornament and color. In contrast, the exterior of Belle’s four-story museum, which she called Fenway Court, is constructed of austere dun-colored brick, with little detail except for the projecting chimney in the shape of a giant Y (for Isabella, or Ysabel, the fifteenth-century queen of Castile) that rises above the original entryway. It was as if she wanted to show Boston a face of humility—albeit a regal one with that Y.
The exterior does nothing to prepare one for what is inside. The original dark entryway opens up almost immediately into an unexpected burst of light, color, and decoration. (A new entrance replicates the same experience.) Here is the heart of the museum: a central courtyard that is a lush oasis alive with tropical and seasonal flowers—orchids, poinsettias, jasmine, azaleas, hydrangeas, flowering nasturtium vines hanging twenty feet down the walls, palm trees, and ferns. It doesn’t seem possible that some of these plants can even grow in Boston, and in midwinter, no less. Even on the gloomiest, snowiest day, light streams in from
the skylight four stories above. It’s a miracle. One is immediately transported to sultry, subtropical Venice and its overripe grandeur.
At the center of the courtyard, a mosaic floor from the second century, salvaged from a villa north of Rome, displays birds, flowers, and tendrils swirling around the face of Medusa, the monstrous and powerful female figure from Greek mythology. Here is Belle putting her stamp: This is a palace created by and for a woman. In Egypt, Belle had prostrated herself on the sands of Giza to ponder—to feel—the vastness of human time and the mystery of mortality and immortality. Her museum invites the visitor to enter into that ancient world and to experience classical beauty by being enveloped in it. Belle orchestrated every inch of the museum, deciding exactly where to position every single piece of artwork, every swath of fabric, every book, every manuscript page, each curious bit of ephemera. The arrangement is a unique piece of art in itself, a house museum unlike any other. Architectural historian Aline Saarinen describes Gardner’s creation as having captured the “seductive siren” that is Venice. In contrast, she points to the masculine severity of the J. P. Morgan Library in New York, which has the “beauty of logic” but lacks the “captivation of caprice” that is at the heart of the Gardner Museum.
Belle often sat on a marble throne at the edge of the central mosaic. There she could savor her creation, her secret garden, and take in its sensual pleasures: the smell of the flowers, the color of the pink stucco walls that rose up all around her four stories high (during construction, Belle, then in her sixties, took up a brush and showed the workers how to achieve the fading color of an ancient palazzo), the song of the finches that flew about the courtyard, and the soothing sound of water. On one wall of the atrium is a seventeenth-century Venetian fountain, with water flowing out of the mouths of stone dolphins. Water—omnipresent in Venice, its sound splashing against the stone steps of the palazzi along the city’s canals—echoes in the Gardner courtyard as well. Above the fountain Belle placed an ancient relief sculpture of a maenad, one of the mythical devotees of Bacchus that danced themselves into states of orgasmic ecstasy. Even more sexually charged is a third-century marble sarcophagus on the edge of the courtyard. On it, naked maenads and naked satyrs caress one another as they gather grapes. This sarcophagus is considered one of the most important ancient works in America. Amid all this exuberant sensuality, Puritan Boston is erased.
Statues and sculptures from the pagan ancient world are carefully sited around the courtyard: a child’s sarcophagus, which was placed in memory of Belle’s child who died at two; a sensuous marble rendering of the Greek goddess Persephone; the granite Horus Hawk, an Egyptian deity, that dates back to the Ptolemaic dynasty; a Roman depiction of the Greek hero Odysseus—the figure shown creeping stealthily—that once served as the pediment for a building; a headless first-century marble of a Greek goddess purchased from the Sisters of San Giuseppe in Rome.
Arcaded cloisters offer shady walkways around the inner courtyard; balconies and balustrades—some removed from the exterior of Ca’ d’Oro, one of the most famous Venetian palaces on the Grand Canal—overlook it. And this is just the beginning. Three floors of galleries rise up around the courtyard, each gallery featuring a particular era, artist, or type of art—among them are the Early Italian Room, the Raphael Room, the Dutch Room, the Veronese Room, the Titian Room, and the Gothic Room.
The museum houses roughly 320 paintings, the same number of prints and drawings, 400 pieces of furniture, 385 sculptures (not counting the many architectural elements embedded in the building itself), 340 textiles of various kinds (tapestries; church vestments; embroidery; pieces of lace, velvet, and silk), and 230 ceramic or glass objects. In addition, there are rare books, illuminated manuscripts, Arabic miniatures, musical scores, and autographs, as well as countless bibelots, some worth a king’s ransom, others holding a personal meaning for Belle alone: an eighteenth-century viola d’amore; a copy of Beethoven’s death mask; locks of hair from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Franz Liszt, and others; a silk flag from a regiment of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard; African arrows collected during the 1871 expedition led by Henry Stanley to find David Livingstone (the famous “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”); Japanese and Venetian lanterns; a plaster cast of William Greenleaf Whittier’s hand; an eighteenth-century Tibetan prayer wheel; and walking sticks that belonged to the artists James McNeill Whistler and John La Farge.
Like Belle herself, the museum is brazen. It breaks every rule of displaying art. Anyone expecting surgically lit gallery spaces with didactic wall captions will be disappointed. There are no captions or potted biographies of the artists on display. At the Gardner, one must encounter each work of art on its own; it is not mediated and deconstructed by curators. The art is what it is. Light in the gallery spaces is uneven at best, changing at various times of the day as the sun moves across the courtyard. This is a living, breathing house, and like any genuine Venetian palace, the rooms are large and shadowy. The interplay of dark and light lends the gallery spaces a nearly religious aura. One almost expects to smell incense while roaming from room to room, many of them stuffed with sacred art of every imaginable variety—altarpieces, church vestments with gold threads, Buddhas, and Madonnas. In fact, there is a chapel in the museum, where an annual high Mass is celebrated on the anniversary of Belle’s death.
Every inch of the museum seems to hold an unexpected treasure or surprise. Art lovers grow giddy over the sheer number of masterpieces on display, all of them competing for attention. This museum is surely a democracy: Even Old Master paintings jostle for space. Titian’s famous Europa hangs above some Parisian silk, part of a ball gown once worn by Belle.
At Belle’s insistence, the palace was built in the manner of a true Renaissance Venetian palazzo. The structure rests on piles driven more than ninety feet through filled-in marshland to bedrock. On the day the pile-driving began in June 1899, Belle emerged from her carriage and almost immediately spotted a four-leaf clover—the first one she’d ever seen. She put the clover in a crystal locket that remains in the museum.
Luck was in the air—but not so for the poor building inspector who had to do battle with Belle. Steel construction, which was the norm for such a large building, was out of the question according to Belle. She had already made Sears delete a steel frame and columns from his original plans. Marble columns would support the structure perfectly well, in her estimation. Renaissance palazzi in Venice—still standing, she pointed out—were built without steel. Back and forth the argument raged. There was some confusion as to whether the building was a public museum or a private residence (in fact, it was both), so Belle used the building’s murky status to avoid turning over plans to the city in a timely fashion. As one newspaper noted, the inspector “never knows what is to be done next and waits upon the pleasure of the society leader.”
Though a few columns had to be reinforced, Belle won the battle and steel construction was avoided. However, when she complained about the escalating cost of the project to the architect, he pointed out that it was impossible to put a price tag on what the house was going to cost when she was constantly changing her plans and violating the building codes. Sears warned her that she might “have to apply for special legislation or apply to the Board of Appeal” if she persisted in using building materials popular in the Renaissance. She was intransigent—which translated into more time, more money. But cost never got in Belle’s way.
Feuds with the city officials continued throughout the construction—and on at least one occasion a convoy of inspectors was sent, perhaps in the vain hope that a show of force would change Belle’s mind. She remained indifferent to their concerns; she’d build it the way she wanted to. She felt she held the trump card: if the city refused to issue a permit when the building was finished, she wouldn’t open the museum to the public.
Belle targeted not only the city officials but also the workmen. She was on-site supervising, complaining, giving orders. Staircases already in place had to be removed a
nd reinstalled to her specifications. She told Sears to fire all the plasterers and hire new ones. She rejected all the plumbing fixtures. She spoke sharply to the men laying the floors, and told them to get to work. When they mimicked her sarcastically, she fired them. She rejected the stone that she had originally chosen and then accused the stonemason of not getting the new stone quickly enough. She called him a liar and the mason quit. Sears calmed him down and talked him out of abandoning the lucrative project. The architect had to play good cop to Belle’s bad cop. She patrolled the construction site, risking life and limb as she climbed ladders and scaffolding. She wanted her ceiling beams hewed in a particular way, so she picked up a broad axe and showed the men how to do it. Alarmed at her fearlessness, Sears advised that an insurance policy be taken out on her; she refused, saying it was unnecessary.
Like a scene out of Citizen Kane, hundreds of enormous wooden crates from Europe lay in a storage warehouse waiting to be unpacked. Belle had a precise vision of how she wanted her museum to look and a method that went right down to the opening of the cases. In the warehouse she’d point to this crate and that one (inevitably ones at the very bottom of a large pile) and have them opened. She sought out the marble columns, capitals, and bases for her first-floor colonnade. She then arranged all of the columns in the warehouse in the exact way she wanted them placed in her museum.
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