Old Masters, New World
Page 7
Still, tragedy pursued the Gardners. Isabella’s brother David, in his midthirties, died shortly before they set sail. Then, in Constantinople, on July 16, the Gardners received word of the death of Jack’s brother, Joseph. (“J. went for the letters and found the two terrible telegrams about poor dear Joe,” she wrote.) Joe, a widower, had three sons, who moved into Jack and Isabella’s Beacon Street house. Seven years later, in 1886, the Gardner’s oldest nephew, also named Joe and described by a Harvard classmate as “the wittiest man of his epoch,” committed suicide. He was only twenty-five, and not long before had been traveling in Europe with Isabella and Jack.
In 1879, Isabella Gardner met Henry James, who was thirty-six and had published his first three novels: Roderick Hudson, The American, and Daisy Miller. In Isabella Gardner, James found a friend (to whom he wrote one hundred letters) and a source for fiction in which he explored the American encounter with Europe and the appropriation of cultural treasure. “If you ‘like being remembered,’ ” he told her, “it is a satisfaction you must be in constant enjoyment of, so indelible is the image which you imprint on the consciousness of your fellow-men.’Look out for my next big novel: it will immortalize me. After that, some day, I will immortalize you.” Indeed, James’s biographer Leon Edel observes that Isabel Archer, the heroine of The Portrait of a Lady, “embodies a notion not unlike that of Isabella of Boston with her motto of C’est mon Plaisir.” The collector may also have inspired Adam Verver in the 1904 novel The Golden Bowl, who is building a “museum of museums, a palace of art” and whose religion is “the passion for perfection at any price.” Phrases that James wrote in his notebook suggested the darker themes he observed in Gardner’s incessant energy and habit of acquisition: “the ‘where are you going’ age of Mrs. Jack, the figure of Mrs. Jack, the American’the Americans looming up, dim vast, portentous in their millions, like gathering waves, the barbarians of the Roman Empire.”
Henry James invited the Gardners into his expatriate American sphere, and they accepted. The year he met them he introduced them to Whistler in London. Only two years before John Ruskin had attacked Whistler’s abstract paintings claiming he “never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler had sued Ruskin for libel, and after a notorious trial, in 1878, where he explained that the title of his painting Nocturne in Blue and Silver was meant to suggest “artistic interest alone, divesting the picture of outside anecdotal interest,” he won. But the court awarded the artist only a farthing in damages and the cost of the lawsuit drove him into bankruptcy.
Isabella Gardner felt immediately enthusiastic for Whistler’s nearly abstract works. Shortly after they met, she commissioned the artist to do her portrait. In pastel, he drew her in a yellow dress on brown paper—characteristically giving the portrait the title The Little Note in Yellow and Gold. In 1892, again in London, she persuaded the reluctant artist to let her have (for 600 guineas, or about $2,400) a seascape, Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville 1865, to which he was particularly attached. “When can we find you?” she wrote him, on December 4. “I want to bring you the cheque and get my picture. Both have to be signed, you know!” Whistler was a dandy who kept his dark hair long, wore a monocle, and carried a cane. No doubt Isabella Gardner appreciated the skill with which the American artist crafted a public image to promote himself and his work. In 1895, she proposed that Whistler paint murals for the Boston Public Library; she had considered purchasing his famous Peacock Room and installing it there. “How can you let the peacock room belong to anybody else!” Sargent asked Gardner. Whistler would credit Gardner for advancing American art. “There was a time when I thought America far away—but you have really changed all that—and this wonderful place of yours on the [Back] Bay [of Boston] ends by being nearer to us than is the Bois to the Boulevards on a summer afternoon!”
The iconoclastic taste that attracted Gardner to Whistler’s paintings played its part in her choice of Old Masters. Like the artist, the collector was an aesthete who shared his conviction that art “is withal selfishly occupied with her own perfection only—having no desire to teach—seeking and finding the beautiful in all conditions and in all times.” She judged paintings on their intrinsic formal qualities—the visual interplay of color, shape, texture, and tone. Gardner’s emphasis on masterpieces reflected her pursuit of the “art for art’s sake” doctrine, her practice of measuring a work of art by its beauty and its power to transmit aesthetic experience.
Meanwhile, Isabella Gardner had begun a love affair with Italy. In 1878, she had attended a series of public lectures given by the Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton on the poetry of Dante. Characteristically, Gardner threw herself into the subject. She studied Italian and joined the Dante Society, a group that gathered in Norton’s living room. With Norton’s encouragement, she purchased rare editions of Dante’s works—a bound edition of The Divine Comedy, dating from 1508, and another from 1481. She took immediately to collecting. “Books, I fear are a most fascinating and dangerous pursuit,” she wrote Norton on July 12, 1886. “But one full of pleasure, and I owe it entirely to you, if I have made a good beginning.”
In 1883, the Gardners took a yearlong trip around the world, stopping in India, China, Japan, Java, and Cambodia, where Isabella insisted that guides take them on an arduous all-day river voyage to reach the legendary twelfth-century temples at Angkor Wat. (“We’started in five small boats’In about two hours the boats could go no farther, so bullock and buffalo carts were got ready with much talk and wait and off we started again.”) They ended the trip with a month in Venice. There, Isabella fell under the city’s thrall—its beauty, history, antiquity, and watery exoticism. A day after arriving, the Gardners visited the Palazzo Barbaro, one of the palaces on the Grand Canal. Built in the sixteenth century by the Barbaro family, the palace was now owned by Americans—Daniel and Ariana Curtis, who were expatriates from Boston and whose son Ralph was a painter and one of the Gardners’ friends. Henry James described the magnificent palace as “all marble and frescoes and portraits of Doges.” It had an open central courtyard and a grand “salone,” whose walls and ceiling were decorated with enormous Baroque paintings set into elaborate gold moldings. In 1898 Sargent painted the Curtises in their late-nineteenth-century white trousers and long skirts, taking tea and reading the newspaper in the ancient Venetian interior that was now their living room.
Starting in 1890, the Gardners leased the Palazzo Barbaro from the Curtises for several months every other summer for eight years. They entertained a steady stream of guests and made the ancient European residence a center of their life. We “were enjoying the moonlight from the second story,” Jack Gardner wrote. “We all five then got into the gondola and floated along the outside, the music accompanying us and the moon sinking into the lagoon.” The constant excitement orchestrated by the Gardners in Venice comes through in a portrait Anders Zorn painted of Isabella at night bursting through double doors from outside into the light of a room. “I am on the balcony, stepping down into the salone pushing both sides of the window back with my arms raised up and spread wide! Exactly like me,” she told a friend. Importantly, for Isabella, the Palazzo Barbaro was only one building away from the bridge that crossed the Grand Canal to the Academia, with its unsurpassed collection of Venetian Old Masters, and she filled an album with black-and-white photographs of the museum’s Renaissance pictures.
When Henry James spent two weeks at the Palazzo Barbaro with the Gardners, in 1892, he was forced by the large number of houseguests to sleep on a cot in the library. Shortly after he left, he thanked his hostess, evoking in his slightly mocking tone the imperious style with which she held court: “I don’t know where this will find you, but I hope it will find you with your hair not quite ‘up’—neither up nor down, as it were, in a gauze dressing-gown, on a seagreen (so different from
peagreen!) chair, beneath a glorious gilded ceiling, receiving the matitudinal tea from a Venetian slave.”
Isabella Stewart Gardner and a gondolier on the Grand Canal, 1894. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Starting in 1890, the Gardners rented the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice every other summer for eight years.
In his 1902 novel, The Wings of the Dove, James would use the Barbaro as a model for the Venetian palace (the Palazzo Leporelli) where his young heroine retreats to spend her final days. He describes “high, florid rooms, palatial chambers’where the sun on the stirred sea-water, flickering up through open windows, played over the painted ‘subjects’ in the splendid ceilings.” He commissioned a photograph of the Barbaro’s facade to place in the front of volume II of the New York edition of the book.
With the death of her father in 1891, Isabella Gardner inherited close to $2 million—an endowment that allowed her to begin collecting Old Masters. “I had two fortunes—my own and Mr. Gardner’s,” she explained. “Mine was for buying pictures, jewels, bric à brac etc etc. Mr. Gardner’s was for household expenses.” Jack Gardner provided Isabella, whom he clearly adored, with not only a financial foundation but also an emotional foundation, on whose bedrock she stood.
In December 1894, four months after Berenson had written Isabella Gardner about Lord Ashburnham’s Botticelli, they met in Paris and went to the Louvre together. The following day, she agreed to buy the painting from him for 3,000 pounds, or $15,000—more than twice what she had paid for the Vermeer. The Death of Lucretia was the first Botticelli to travel to America. The painting was richly colored—a scene with small figures set in an open square framed by monumental classical buildings. Lucretia is a young woman in a green dress prostrate on a tomb, a knife in her chest, surrounded by soldiers who have discovered her suicide. In addition to conveying the emotion of the charged encounter, Botticelli also conclusively demonstrates his abilities to create the illusion of space with linear perspective in the setting of the scene. Later, the art historian Laurence Kanter described it as “certainly one of the great masterpieces of Florentine painting from the last years of probably its greatest period, the golden age of the fifteenth century.”
With the Botticelli, Isabella Gardner took American collecting in a new direction, and her collaboration with Bernard Berenson began. She enlisted him as a scout for Old Masters and agreed to pay him a 5 percent commission on the price of each purchase. As dealers typically charged commissions of 10 percent when they acted as brokers, she thought she was getting Berenson’s advice for a bargain. At least in the short run, she would be wrong.
Bernard Berenson
When Bernard Berenson wrote to Isabella Stewart Gardner about a Botticelli, he could safely assume his word alone would make the painting of interest to her. The older woman and the younger man had been friends for close to a decade. They met in the mid-1880s, through Charles Eliot Norton, the Harvard professor, whose enthusiasm for Dante and early Renaissance art would leave an imprint on both their lives. She was in her early forties, already a prominent cultural figure in Boston. He was an undergraduate in his early twenties, and far more of an outsider than she could ever be. Born a Lithuanian Jew, Berenson had immigrated to Boston with his family in 1875 when he was ten. Even before he got to Harvard, he exploited his intellectual prowess to cross the social and economic divide between himself and the privileged Americans who became his fellow students and friends.
At Harvard, Berenson gave Gardner his photograph. He had a rough-cut, boyish face, a straight nose, full, curving lips, and wavy dark hair that fell to his jacket collar and lent him the look of a romantic poet. She kept the picture and above it she wrote: “Bernhard Berenson as I first saw him.” Berenson happened to be two years younger than her late son and she must have noticed that he had been born in June 1865, only one month after her child had died. Despite their differences in background, Gardner and Berenson had much in common, their friendship founded upon their shared enthusiasm for Italian art, their reverence for beauty.
Over the course of thirty-odd years, Gardner and Berenson saw each other fewer than a dozen times. Yet the relationship loomed large in both their lives, thriving on a transatlantic correspondence they infused with sensuality and romance, as they described to each other their ecstatic encounters with landscape, music, and art. They wrote each other more than one thousand letters, many of them testimonies to late-nineteenth-century aestheticism. The letters are intimate, their language seductive.
Gardner relished playing the part of Berenson’s supporter, patron, and confidant, and he the complicated, conflicted role of art adviser, suitor, and friend. “Well, I come again trying to despoil you,” Berenson wrote in August 1895. “This time it is a Tintoretto I wish you to buy.” She would answer in kind. “The delightful letter’by the way made me quite frantic to fly to Fiesole and drink in the air—and perhaps saunter with you in the sunny afternoons.” When he sent her a photograph of a Rembrandt, she replied: “I am bitten by the Rembrandt, and today being Sunday, I wait until tomorrow and then cable ‘Yes Rembrandt’! Also ‘Yes Tintoretto.’’And of course, I am hoping for the Guardi.”
Hungry for economic and social advancement, he laced his prose with flattery. Gardner basked in his attention, thrilled by the chance to purchase pictures and to voice her thoughts to someone who so exactly shared her passions and taste. Berenson also delivered practical advice and when it suited his purposes invited the Gardners into the exclusive European art world. When they traveled in Italy, he suggested collections to see, and introduced them to Count Moroni, who, he explained, had “the finest Moronis in the world.” He then insisted Isabella tell him “whether in your opinion there is a more distinguished, and more refined, as well as more genial portrait in the world than Moroni’s Man in Black. You will see it was not by any means Whistler who invented tone.”
Bernard Berenson, 1886. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. “As I first saw him—” Gardner wrote on the photograph. They met when she was in her midforties and he a student at Harvard.
Both Gardner and Berenson would exploit their relationship and collaboration in the collecting of Old Master pictures to reinvent themselves, and each would contribute to the lasting legacy of the other. When they first met in Cambridge, each had already begun a process of self-transformation.
Bernard Berenson was born on June 26, 1865, in Butrimonys, a village in Lithuania, then the western part of Russia where Jews were permitted to live. He was the first child of Albert Valvrojenski and Judith Mickleshanski, who had married the year before. Valvrojenski was an intellectual, a devotee of Voltaire and the Enlightenment, who earned his living buying and selling timber. According to Ernest Samuels, Berenson’s biographer, Valvrojenski “avidly imbibed the anticlerical skepticism of the German-Jewish writers. German became the first language of his children, though Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and scraps of Lithuanian met day-to-day needs in the polyglot life of the village.” Later Bernard would acknowledge his father’s early role in promoting his intellectual life. “I found you the most stimulating and fascinating of companions,” he wrote Albert. “I don’t know what I don’t owe to the talks I used to overhear between you and your friends.”
When the Valvrojenskis (who now had a daughter, Senda, and a second son, Abraham) immigrated to Boston, they took the name of Berenson, already adopted by a cousin, and Albert worked as a peddler. (Berenson spelled his name “Bernhard” until World War I, when he anglicized it, dropping the “h.”) They had always encouraged the intellectually precocious Bernard to study, and they sent him to the elite Boston Latin School. In Boston, two more Berenson children, Elisabeth and Rachel, were born.
Bernard proved himself an excellent student with a facility for languages. He worked his way to Boston University, and after a year transferred to Harvard, entering as a freshman in 1884. He studied Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, and German and took Pr
ofessor Charles Eliot Norton’s courses on Dante and on Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance art. He also joined a circle of undergraduate aesthetes and Norton followers—including Charles Loeser, Logan Pearsall Smith, and George Santayana. At Harvard, he had himself baptized as an Episcopalian. Before he graduated, in 1887, Berenson applied for a traveling fellowship, which he failed to win. But a Harvard instructor raised $700 from friends, among them Isabella Gardner, to fund a year abroad. Berenson sailed for Europe, planning to become a writer.
But after only a few months, while in Italy, Berenson set his mind on turning himself into an expert on Italian Renaissance art. Later he described the decision to give himself up “to learning, to distinguish between the authentic works of an Italian painter of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, and those commonly ascribed to him,” as a revelation. “Here at Bergamo,” he wrote, “and in all the fragrant and romantic valleys that branch out northward, we must not stop till we are sure that every Lotto is a Lotto, every Cariani a Cariani, every Previtali a Previtali.” His ambitions to become a professional connoisseur suited the Harvard graduate and aesthete, who recognized that much work had to be done to sort out Italian pictures and that the American desire for Old Masters was driving up demand for such art expertise.