Old Masters, New World

by Cynthia Saltzman

  In the end, Henry Gurdon Marquand shaped not only the Metropolitan’s content but also its form. In 1894, he and his fellow trustees decided to expand the museum with an “east wing” and asked Richard Morris Hunt to prepare drawings for the new addition. They wanted to re­orient the museum and erect a new entrance on Fifth Avenue. But before completing the plans, Hunt unexpectedly died. When asked whether the trustees should choose a new architect, Marquand insisted that they “carry out the Hunt design.” He told Cesnola: “There will be no chance for anybody ­else to come in and snatch his monument,” and he turned the project over to Hunt’s son, Richard Howland Hunt, also an architect. Completed in 1902, the Fifth Avenue facade transformed the Metropolitan into one of New York’s most spectacular buildings.

  In his design, Hunt took inspiration from Greece, Rome, and the High Re­nais­sance, weaving classical forms into a pale, vast, and elaborate scheme befitting a museum of the industrial age and trumpeting its identity as a temple of art, intended to both dazzle and instruct. The front climbed two tall stories and stretched half a city block. (Later it expanded both north and south.) Four pairs of colossal Corinthian columns soared almost to the roof, to form a central portico and frame three arches. Hunt envisioned paying homage to the artists of Eu­rope by decorating the architecture with inscriptions and sculpture, but bud­get constraints eliminated much of the detailing. Nevertheless, high up six stone medallions with portraits of Michelangelo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Dürer as well as of the architect Bramante paid tribute to Eu­rope’s Masters.

  Inside, the architecture also celebrated the Eu­ro­pe­an tradition, sweeping visitors from a great hall (crowned by three domes) and up the ­forty-­six steps of a grand, stone staircase to a gallery filled with over one hundred Old Masters. Marquand’s fifty pictures ­were hanging in a nearby room. When the modernist critic Roger Fry took charge of the Metropolitan’s paintings in 1906, he insisted on separating out the finest pictures and placing them in a single ­gallery—Gallery ­XXIV—in imitation of the Salon Carré at the Louvre, to point out that “some things are more worthy than others of prolonged and serious attention.” Five years later, the director Edward Robinson underlined Fry’s point by pulling masterpieces from Gallery XXIV and setting them center stage in the room at the top of the stairs, which the trustees now renamed the Marquand Gallery. There, directly across from the arched entrance, stood James Stuart, Duke of Richmond and ­Lennox—the centerpiece of a single line of five extraordinary ­pictures—Frans Hals’s portraits at either end, as well as Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher and a second Vermeer, called A Lady Writing, to balance it. Marquand had given four out of the five canvases two de­cades before and now the museum hung them against dark damask and gave each room to breathe and cast its spell.

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photographed in 1917. Richard Morris Hunt’s 1902 Fifth Avenue facade transformed the museum into one of New York’s most spectacular buildings.

  CHAPTER II

  “C’est Mon Plaisir”

  Isabella Stewart Gardner, Bernard Berenson,

  Otto Gutekunst, and Titian’s Eu­ropa

  “How much do you want a Botticelli?” The question was sent to Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston in a letter posted by Bernard Berenson on August 1, 1894, from London. Berenson, ­thirty-­one, had, with the publication of the groundbreaking Venetian Paint­ers of the Re­nais­sance, recently established himself as an expert on Italian art. Four months before, he had sent Gardner a copy of his book, and earlier that summer, when she was in Paris, he urged her not to miss an exhibition of En­glish pictures.

  Soon after, Isabella Gardner asked Berenson his opinion of several Italian Old Master pictures proposed to her by dealers in France. Berenson replied that the paintings ­were not what these dealers claimed and offered her the Botticelli instead. “Lord Ashburnham has a great ­one—one of the greatest: a Death of Lucretia,” he wrote. But, he “is not keen about selling it.” Yet, Berenson thought that “a handsome offer would not insult him.”

  Berenson also named a price: “about £3,000,” or some $15,000. He added, “If you cared about it, I could, I dare say, help you in getting the best terms.”

  Isabella Stewart Gardner had made her first major purchase of an Old Master painting two years before, on December 5, 1892, at the Paris auction of the collection of the late Théophile Thoré. The day before the sale, an artist friend had accompanied her to peruse Thoré’s art, and there she saw the three Vermeers that ­were to be auctioned. To bid for her, Gardner hired Fernand Robert, a Paris antiques dealer. At the time, auctions generally operated as a ­wholesale market, where dealers acquired stock. If they knew that a collector wanted a par­tic­u­lar work of art in a sale, they would try to buy it in hopes of selling it to the collector immediately afterward.

  The first Vermeer in the Thoré auction, A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, went to a Paris dealer, Stephen Bourgeois, for 29,000 francs. Bidding for the second, The Concert, again climbed to 29,000 francs, and Fernand Robert won the picture.

  “Mrs. G. bought the van der Meer picture for fr. 29, 000,” John Lowell “Jack” Gardner, Isabella’s husband, noted matter-of-factly in his diary.

  No doubt The Concert struck Isabella Gardner because of its understated, ­well-­plotted beauty. The small picture was a Dutch interior where two young women, one in a glimmering white skirt seated at a harpsichord, and a young man in a brown jacket with a lute, are performing a piece of music on the far side of a room, across a floor patterned with ­black-­and-­white squares. On the wall behind them hang two large Dutch Old Masters in black frames. In the complex interlocking of colors and shapes made from the musicians, the instruments, the fabrics, the paintings, and the furniture, some in shadow and others in light, Vermeer captured the fleeting enchantment of the music, translating the elusive spell of one art form into another. Gardner’s new acquisition was the first Vermeer to reach Boston and the second in the United States. With a commission, the canvas cost Gardner 31,175 francs, or just over $6,000. Although Henry Marquand had paid only $800 for his Vermeer five years before, Gardner’s purchase soon looked like a bargain. In August a friend reported that a Dutch art expert “says your concert is now worth easily between 150 and 200 thousand [francs]!” Indeed, soon after, Stephen Bourgeois turned around and sold his Young Woman Standing at a Virginal to the National Gallery in London for 50,000 francs, or $10,000. Prices of Old Master pictures ­were rising.

  Still, in the ­mid-1890s, the number of Americans buying Old Masters remained small. Gardner’s purchase at a Paris auction showed her in­de­pen­dence of mind and her ambitions as a ­collector—and that she had her ear to the ground among progressive artists in London and Paris. In proposing the rare Botticelli to Gardner, Berenson knew well she was likely to leap at the chance to acquire it. She had definite, individual taste, with par­tic­u­lar likes and dislikes. She had spent several summers in Venice and was drawn to the art of the Italian Re­nais­sance. Rembrandt was the favorite artist of America’s tycoons, but not hers. “You know, or rather, you don’t know, that I adore Giotto,” she wrote Berenson in 1900, “and really don’t adore Rembrandt. I only like him.” He shared her pioneering taste for Italian art and sympathized: “I am not anxious to have you own braces of Rembrandts, like any vulgar millionaire,” he wrote. A devout Anglican, Gardner had no problem with religious imagery. The same summer she won the Vermeer, she had also purchased a Spanish Madonna and a Florentine Virgin and Child. Soon she spelled out her wish to buy Italian pictures, claiming that a Filippino Lippi and a Tintoretto (along with “a Velasquez [sic] very good”) ­were her “foremost desire always.” She added: “Only very good need apply!” Unlike Marquand, Gardner was buying for herself, her own plea­sure, and her Beacon Hill ­house, where she hung both new and old paintings and propped the extras on chairs. Like Marquand and even more emphatically than him, she insisted upon masterpieces.

  When Berenson prop
osed the Botticelli, Isabella Stewart Gardner was ­fifty-­six, slim, and elegant. She directed her life with a theatrical sense of style. She had pale skin, dark hair, an oval face with ­almond-­shaped eyes, a long straight nose, and a full, awkward mouth, which, like her eyes, curved slightly down and suggested the seriousness that, for all her flamboyance, was at the core of her personality. She had a long neck and an erect carriage. She wore ­well-­cut clothes (many designed by Charles Worth and imported from Paris), which spoke to her love of textiles but also to her creativity and skill in shaping her own image. In a ­black-­and white photograph, she stares out with a mix of wisdom and innocence, her willowy figure clad in a fitted dress of dark watered satin with a high collar, long sleeves, and buttons running straight down its front. In summer, she wore ­large-­brimmed hats festooned with veils that she tied down around her neck. Perhaps increasingly ­self-­conscious about her face, she covered it as she aged. In her sixties, she would maintain her narrow form, holding her neck straight and her head high.

  Photograph of Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1888, taken by J. Thompson, Grosvenor Street, London. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. An aesthete, she brilliantly shaped her public image and pioneered the collecting of Old Masters.

  Energetic and ­self-­possessed, Isabella Gardner was a New Yorker who cut her own path in Boston, breaking the establishment rules in dress, social practice, and collecting. Her marriage to Jack Gardner, a Boston Brahmin, brought her to the top of Boston’s social hierarchy and gave her the freedom to shape her own role as a visible patron of advanced art. She is “the most dashing of fashion’s local cynosures,” as one critic put it, “who can order the ­whole symphony orchestra to her ­house for a private musicale.”

  Diva and muse, she gathered about her a circle of artists, writers, and ­musicians—young men whose careers she championed, who kept her up with their work and who ­were drawn to her ­larger-­than-­life persona. “She lives at a rate and intensity,” Berenson wrote, “and with a reality that makes other lives seem pale, thin and shadowy.” But after three de­cades in Boston, Gardner still described herself as a “New York foreigner.” Indeed, Boston society never embraced her, and she in turn exploited her outsider identity to fullest advantage. If Bostonians frowned on extravagance, she spent freely on clothes, jewelry ($83,000 on a necklace and a ruby ring), and concerts. By traveling frequently in Eu­rope and making a habit of summers in Venice, she joined a circle of influential American expatriates, including not only John Singer Sargent but also James McNeill Whistler and Henry James, who in various ways encouraged her collecting.

  In 1886, Henry James had taken Isabella Gardner to Sargent’s London studio specifically to see the notorious portrait Madame X. Far from frightened off, Gardner commissioned Sargent to paint her own portrait, which he began immediately after he finished painting Elizabeth Marquand. Where he had portrayed the wife of the Metropolitan Museum’s president conventionally and naturalistically, as an American aristocrat smiling and seated in a chair, he turned Isabella Gardner into an icon, a symmetrical image set before a hanging of Venetian brocade with a radiating pattern of red, ochre, and gold, designed to convey her singularity as a devotee and patron of art. She stands, facing us straight on in a long black dress with a low neck and short sleeves, her shoulders drawn back and her hands clasped so her white arms form an oval. Henry James suggested the artifice of the Sargent portrait when he described it as a “Byzantine Madonna with a Halo.” Sargent showed the portrait in his first American exhibition at the St. Botolph Club on Boston’s Beacon Hill, entitling it “Woman, an Enigma.” What shocked Boston ­were the ropes of pearls around Gardner’s neck and waist, and the décolletage of the dress. In her slightly parted lips and her bold gaze, Sargent also suggested Gardner’s ­engaged presence and quickness of mind. The artist painted the portrait six years before Gardner bought the Vermeer, but his tribute to her as a high priestess of art was one she embraced. Her appetite for art was not a pose but a passion; aestheticism became the guiding principal of her life. Given money, she acquired paintings, sculpture, antique furniture, and other decorative ­arts—casting herself by means of her collection as a Re­nais­sance patron, and taking the domestic environment to which she as a woman was restricted and turning it ultimately into a public space designed to display art and express herself as a collector. “Mrs. Gardner’s collecting seems to have been part of a strategy” the art historian Kathleen ­Weil-­Garris Brandt has written, “that developed to win for herself as a woman, albeit a rich and powerful one in Victorian Boston, the freedoms, the ­self-­definition, ­and—crucially—the social and intellectual respect which she believed her Re­nais­sance woman models to have enjoyed.”

  Later, when Gardner built the museum where she also lived, she placed above the door a coat of arms, with a phoenix, and into the stone carved the words “C’est Mon Plaisir”—It Is My Plea­sure. The phrase was not simply a declaration of ego (“the justification for her every action,” as one biographer put it), but resonated with the aestheticism of the nineteenth century and summarized the creed that art above all involved sensuous plea­sure and spiritual enlightenment.

  Gardner’s cosmopolitanism and spirited approach to life began early. She was born on April 14, 1840, at 20 University Place in New York, the oldest of four children of Adelia Smith and David Stewart, a wealthy, ­first-­generation Scottish entrepreneur who had made money importing linen from Ireland and Scotland and then investing in iron mines. In 1854, when Isabella was fourteen, her younger sister, Adelia, died. Two years later, the Stewarts, socially and culturally ambitious for their surviving daughter, took an extended trip to Eu­rope, where they enrolled Isabella in a Paris school. There she met Julia and Eliza Gardner, the daughters of John Lowell Gardner, a Boston shipping magnate, and through them their brother Jack. “The Stewarts are as usual all kindness,” Julia Gardner wrote her mother on a visit to New York on October 8, 1859. “They are constantly repeating, ‘Make yourself perfectly at home, this is Liberty Hall,’ and, moreover, they provide their guests with every comfort and luxury.” Julia and Isabella went to the theater, the opera, Central Park, and to see Frederick Church’s enormous landscape, Heart of the Andes, exhibited at the artist’s Tenth Street studio.

  Jack Gardner had dark, straight hair, a high forehead, dark eyes, and an open, boyish face. He had left Harvard after his sophomore year to work for his father’s shipping company. A sailor, he owned a series of yachts and joined the syndicate that built the Puritan, a sloop that in 1885 successfully defended the America’s Cup. Later, Henry James described Jack as kind, courteous, and generous. “He remains one of my images (none too numerous) of those moving in great affairs with a temper that matched them & yet never lost its consideration for small affairs & for the people condemned to them.”

  Like Isabella, Jack loved to have fun. He was “all abundance & health & gaiety as I last saw him,” James wrote. But he was also modest and ­self-­effacing. Henry Lee Higginson, a found­er of the Boston Symphony, found him a kindred spirit and seemed to speak directly to his character when he later wrote to Isabella that “Jack, you and I have held the same view of life and its duties and in doing so may have forgotten the painful ­subject—one’s self. It was the natural result.”

  By February 28, 1859, Isabella and Jack ­were engaged, and a year later they ­were married at Grace Church, the fashionable ­neo-­Gothic Episcopal church near the Stewart’s ­house in Manhattan. “Surely no one has so many causes to rejoice as myself,” Isabella wrote Julia Gardner. The couple moved to Boston and lived in a hotel before moving into the ­house that her father built for them at 152 Beacon Street. In 1880, the Gardners expanded by buying the ­house next door, where they added a music room for concerts. Later, they also owned ­houses in Brookline, where Isabella kept a green­house, and in Prides Crossing, on Boston’s North Shore. In August they would spend two weeks on a private island down east off the coast of Maine, where Isabella, an athle
te, described her “great amusement” as “Indian canoeing on visits to the seals.”

  Almost from the start, the Gardners suffered a series of losses. On September 10, 1860, Isabella gave birth to a stillborn baby boy. Three years later she had a son, John Lowell Gardner III (“Jackie”), who ­contracted pneumonia when he was not yet two years old and, on May 15, 1865, he died. Shortly thereafter, Isabella seems to have suffered a miscarriage, and went into a deep depression.

  Hoping to mend her broken spirits, the Gardners sailed for Eu­rope in the spring of 1867 and traveled for a year. On the trip, which took them to Scandinavia, Rus­sia, Austria, and France, she began to recover. Six years later, the Gardners went abroad again for almost twelve ­months—this time to see Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, and Greece. Isabella kept an elaborate travel book, which she filled with photographs and where she recorded her perceptions in evocative, hyperbolic prose that suggested her aesthetic leanings. “I have never had such an experience,” she wrote, after seeing the temples at Karnak at night, “and I felt as if I never wanted to see anything again in this world; that I might shut my eyes to keep that vision clear. It was not beautiful, but most grand, mysterious, solemn.” At Esneh, she wrote: “The river runs liquid gold and everything seems turned into the precious metal, burning with inward fire.” Traveling helped her escape the heartbreaking recollections in Boston, and her writing shows that she had also left behind the conventional role the Victorians assigned to women, one centered upon children and the home.