The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  Occasionally they saw eye to eye. This was the case with Botticelli’s The Tragedy of Lucretia, which Berenson was able to acquire for Belle at the astonishingly low price of $16,500. It would be the first Botticelli ever to hang in an American collection. There were other important purchases. By the end of the Gardners’ long European stay, Belle and Jack Gardner had bought nineteen paintings, nine by contemporary artists and ten Old Masters purchased through Berenson. Their collection was now beginning to have a focus. It would be Italian Renaissance and Dutch genre painting.

  In Europe, too, Belle had made another interesting young acquaintance. Strolling through the Louvre, she had noticed a boy—he was no more than sixteen or seventeen—who was studying the pictures with particular concentration. She struck up a conversation with the youth and found him to be surprisingly knowledgeable about art for his age. Impressed, Belle took him to lunch, and they remained friends for many years afterward. His name was Walter Lippmann, and he would later claim that it was Belle Gardner’s inspiration and encouragement that made him decide to become a writer.

  Back home in Boston, Belle continued to correspond with Berenson by letter and cable, and more paintings were acquired—a Titian, a Raphael, Van Dykes, Vermeers, Zorns, a Rembrandt self-portrait, a second Botticelli. The collection was now outgrowing the Beacon Street house, and the Gardners began giving serious consideration to the idea of building a museum. As usual, they could not agree. Belle wanted to build an addition on the back of 152. Jack argued that this would cut off their neighbors’ sunlight. Belle said she didn’t care. Jack proposed building a separate structure on newly reclaimed land on the Fenway, but Belle thought this was too far from the center of town. Then, on December 9, 1898, Jack Gardner was stricken with a heart attack at his club. He was brought home, doctors were called, but he died early that evening. He was sixty-one years old.

  Belle, once again, was devastated. After his funeral she went into deep seclusion, and it was assumed that she was suffering from another of her nervous breakdowns. Actually, the plans for her museum were proceeding. Now that she had no one to argue with, she decided that her late husband had been right after all, and she purchased the property he had wanted on the Fenway. Before her husband’s death she had hired an architect, Willard T. Sears of Boston, and told him what she had in mind. To further her endeavor she now had additional financial support in her inheritance from her husband, in the form of two trust funds totaling $2,300,000.

  With her husband’s death, however, she became notoriously tightfisted with her money. Everything was to be spent on her art collection and her museum, and it was said that each time Isabella Gardner bought a painting she put her servants on short rations. This may have been true, because even her friends complained of the meager fare and tiny servings at her dinner table. The custodian of her collection, Morris Carter, had a daily errand which was to go down to a corner store and buy a fresh orange for his mistress. One day, thinking to save himself a trip the following day, Carter ordered two oranges. The sales clerk at the grocery store was astonished. “The old lady going to have a party?” she wanted to know.

  To help pay for the museum, the house on Beacon Street would be sold, but with characteristic stubbornness she refused to sell until the new purchaser had agreed not to use the number 152. Number 152 belonged to Belle, and the new owner could use 150 instead. And she continued to bicker with Bernard Berenson back and forth across the Atlantic. A friend, she told him, had advised her that she had paid too much for a certain picture. She complained about his commissions, even though, out of gratitude for her early sponsorship of his studies, he charged her only five percent instead of the ten that was customary. She would delay paying him, and then react angrily when he sent her “dunning letters.” His letters to her were full of pleas of “Dear lady, do please be reasonable!” She never realized, of course, how fortunate she was to be paying the kind of prices Berenson was obtaining for her, since she was assembling her collection a few years before much wealthier collectors such as Eva Stotesbury and J. P. Morgan, who also worked through Duveen, would drive European art prices to the skies.

  But Berenson’s travails with Belle were as nothing compared with those of her architect. What Belle had in mind was an Italian palazzo in Back Bay. To begin with, everything had to be kept a deep secret. No news of the proposed palace was to be released to the press because Belle wanted her museum to be sprung on the public as a glorious surprise. The façade of the house was to be kept simple, almost stark. The idea was that the structure should be turned inward, about a huge center courtyard, covered with glass, which was to contain a fountain and sculpture and flowers and tropical foliage that would bloom year-round. Sketches were submitted and rejected, revised and resubmitted. Doorways were relocated, rooms shifted from place to place. If Sears pointed out to Belle that a room was too large to carry a ceiling without supporting columns, Belle would merely reply that she wanted no columns, and Mr. Sears would simply have to figure out a way. Even as the ground for the great house was being broken, the plans were still in a state of flux.

  The house was to be called Fenway Court, and its design belongs to Isabella Gardner as much as to Willard Sears. She insisted, for example, on having windows from the façades of Venetian palaces line the indoor courtyard, and capitals that should have gone on the tops of pilasters placed at their bases instead. She also wanted her new house to remind her of 152 Beacon Street in little ways, and walls and chimney pieces were imported from the old house. An unfounded rumor circulated to the effect that one wall covering was to be done in fabric from one of Belle’s old ball gowns. Repeatedly Mr. Sears warned her of the danger of creating a hodgepodge of eclecticism, but Belle assured him that it would all work. The rooms of the palazzo would reflect the art they would eventually display. There would be a Titian Room, a Dutch Room, a Gothic Room, a Raphael Room. As the building began to rise, daily changes in the plans and specifications were made, and Belle found it practical to spend her days at the construction site, eating out of a lunch pail, chattering excitedly with her Italian laborers in their language. At one point, rebelling against Belle’s excessive demands and instructions that changed from one moment to the next, her laborers struck. Belle responded by firing them all. Within a few days they were back at the job.

  When it came to the interiors, she was equally hard to please. In one particular room the painters seemed unable to get the color right. Belle wanted a yellowish pink that was not too pink and not too yellow. Finally she seized a paint bucket and a brush and climbed a tall ladder to show the painters what she wanted—a tiny lady, nearly sixty, in an ankle-length skirt. Miraculously, the color that she achieved was perfect.

  Meanwhile, all of Boston speculated about what was going on in the Fenway. Sears had been engaged in 1898, and by late 1900 the building was still far from finished. But Boston began to get a clue when a huge marble plaque was installed over the front entrance of the building. It read:

  THE ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER MUSEUM IN THE FENWAY MDCCCC

  The date marked the incorporation of the museum, but it would not be until January of 1903 that Belle Gardner pronounced herself satisfied with the house, the collection was installed, and Fenway Court was ready for its official vernissage. This took place at a formal, invitation-only gathering for two hundred guests. Guests had been told to arrive at “nine o’clock, punctually,” which created congestion on the street outside and a long line up the walk to Belle’s front door, where the cream of Boston society in all its finery waited for the clockstroke. At nine, the door swung open, and there stood Mrs. Gardner’s major-domo, resplendent in green knee britches, black patent-leather boots with gold buckles, and a crimson swallow-tail coat splashed with gold epaulettes and much gold braiding. Guests were ushered up one flight of the curved double staircase to where, in a balcony at the top, their hostess—all in black, roped with her pearls, a ruby at her throat and the two huge diamonds in her hair—stood waiting to receive
them. They then proceeded down the other branch of the staircase into the Music Room, there to be entertained with a concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Throughout the musical portion of the evening, Mrs. Gardner sat regally alone on her balcony above.

  Then it was time to explore the magnificent house and the art treasures it contained. The entire palazzo was lit by thousands of candles, and wood fires burned in the huge fireplaces as guests moved through room after room of Titian, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Botticelli, and tapestries, gasping at the wonder of it all. But the most thrilling moment came as they entered the central, glass-roofed courtyard, where champagne was being served. The courtyard, too, was lighted with candles, torches, and braziers. Though it was the middle of a New England winter, the effect was of entering the Alhambra Gardens in southern Spain. Fountains splashed, and from the balconies of the tall tiered windows that rose above, crimson nasturtiums cascaded down like brilliant waterfalls. In the garden itself, monumental pieces of Greek and Roman sculpture reposed among tall palms and ficus trees, fiddle-leaf figs, showy hibiscus, and purple, red, and orange bougainvillaea. The house itself was beautiful, but the courtyard garden was breathtaking. There was no question that Fenway Court was a work of art on its own. Throughout the winter of 1903, Boston talked of little else but Fenway Court and Belle Gardner’s periodic evening entertainments.

  As a museum, of course, the Isabella Stewart Gardner was from the outset something of an anomaly. There was the annoying problem, for example, of exactly what it was. From the large marble plaque above the entrance, it had first appeared to be a public institution. Then the plaque was mysteriously covered with a blank marble slab, as though to remind visitors that this was also Belle Gardner’s house, and her only one. Many art collectors wait until their death before offering their collections for public view. But Belle wanted the fun of seeing the public admire and enjoy her art. At the same time, she quite understandably felt that she was entitled to a certain amount of privacy in her home, but from the outset she discovered that it would be difficult to have her cake and eat it, too.

  When she first opened Fenway Court to the public during the daytime, she had somewhat naïvely assumed that her visitors would be a genteel and gentle group of serious art lovers and connoisseurs. Instead, there was a pushing, crushing, elbowing mob of tourists, sightseers, and merely curious Bostonians. The building codes and fire laws permitted no more than two hundred visitors to the museum at a time, and during the first days of its opening hundreds of angry people had to be turned away. Clearly, some form of ticketing seemed to be indicated, and Belle decided to charge a dollar a ticket. There was more outcry over this, and complaints that other local institutions of art and learning—the Boston Museum of Art, the Public Library—charged no admission. Why should the Gardner Museum? Why did Mrs. Gardner consider herself so special? There was angry talk of boycotts.

  Belle also quickly discovered that the museum-going public was not the breed of gentlefolk she had imagined. People came with their lunches and spread out picnics in the courtyard. They brought small children, whose muddy boots soiled her rugs and whose sticky fingers smudged her silk brocade upholstery and wall coverings. Visitors constantly tried to invade Belle’s private apartments on the upper floor and to wrench open locked closets and storage rooms to see what might be inside. There was also outright theft and vandalism. Belle had never believed in the banality of keeping the smaller objets d’art of her collection locked in vitrines or glass cases. These objects were openly displayed on tables and shelves, and during the first few days of public viewing a number of precious pieces disappeared. Chips appeared in marble statues. At one point Belle noticed a woman visitor fingering the corner of a Gobelin tapestry and stepped over to her, starting to explain the subtlety of the Gobelin’s texture and design, only to discover that in the woman’s other hand was a pair of scissors. She had been about to snip off a corner of the tapestry for a souvenir.

  One of Belle’s rules was that there could be no photographing, no sketching, and no note taking in her museum. This irritated the members of the press, who seemed to feel that their First Amendment rights were being infringed. She was attacked in the newspapers, where dark hints were dropped that Belle had been permitted to bring her art into the country duty-free on the ground that it was to be displayed for the public weal, but here was a museum that was not public at all. Belle, the newspapers claimed, was guilty of defrauding the citizens of Boston and the United States taxpayers. Belle quickly made a new rule: No members of the press to be admitted to her museum under any circumstances. Now, of course, the grumbling in the papers was even nastier.

  Exasperated with what appeared to be happening to her innocent dream, Belle Gardner decided to adopt a policy that was really no policy at all: She would open her museum when she felt like it, and keep it closed when she didn’t. Now there was no way of telling from one day to the next whether a hopeful visitor would find Fenway Court open or closed, and, of course, this fact created more public anger and resentment. It was a damned-if-she-did, damned-if-she-didn’t situation which might have defeated a less doughty woman. Though she occasionally expressed bitterness over the way her gift to the public was being received, she did her best to ignore it. “I never expected gratitude,” she once said airily. She was happy, she said, if only a handful of the public could obtain some delight from seeing her art collection. As for the rest of them, they could go straight to hell.

  On days when her museum was open, meanwhile, she usually succeeded in rewarding visitors with one thing they wanted. Many came not so much to see the art collection at Fenway Court as to get a glimpse of the legendary lady behind it, and they were seldom disappointed. On open days there she would be, a tiny, imperious figure hovering about and keeping a watchful eye on things. In this endeavor, of course, she needed help, and a variety of paid and volunteer docents was tried with varying degrees of success. Finally she hit on a perfect solution: she would use Harvard students, but of course not just any Harvard students. The young men selected to work for Mrs. Gardner’s museum had to have certain qualifications. They must be clean, well-groomed, and well-mannered. It helped if they were studying Art, and it helped even more if they were good-looking. It was essential, however, that they all be earning good marks. For the next twenty years, until her death in 1924, the succession of bright, young, and attractive men who served her as guards and ushers in her capriciously run museum, and amused her with their company and conversation in their spare time, would be known as “Mrs. Jack’s Museum Boys.” Collectively they began to think of themselves as members of a select fraternity.

  It struck many people as ironic that Belle, who had lost her seemingly robust husband when he was only sixty-one, should have survived him, despite her own record of delicate health, to the ripe old age of eighty-four in the middle of the Roaring Twenties. During her later years she nearly always wore white. Black, she decided, was an old woman’s color, and in white she felt youthful. In 1894 Anders Zorn had painted her in a white dress, her bare white arms outflung against an open French door with the city of Venice shimmering in the background. Many years later a series of small strokes left her without the full use of the hands and arms she was so proud of, and so she concealed them beneath huge white shawls and scarves of white silk and net. Sometimes she wound a white shawl about her head, turban-fashion, and let the rest of the fabric fall over her shoulders, arms and hands. John Singer Sargent painted her that way in 1922, wrapped in yards and yards of white fabric like a mummy, everything concealed except her white face with its stern and piercing eyes looking straight out of the canvas, inscrutable and Sphinx-like.

  Even at the very end, Belle enjoyed a good time. She celebrated her eighty-fourth birthday in 1924 in her usual fashion, with a large party at Fenway Court. Just a few days before her death, she was driven into Boston in her old Pierce-Arrow to watch the street parade for a local Elks convention.

  Everyone in Boston who remembers her has a favor
ite Isabella Stewart Gardner story. Edward Weeks, the retired editor of The Atlantic Monthly, remembers being invited to her house for tea in the early 1920s when he was a Harvard student. She lay on a Récamier sofa, swathed in white under an ermine rug. It was an occasion, like most, of some drama, for Belle announced to young Weeks that she was destroying all her correspondence. Mounds of it lay about her on the Récamier, and as Weeks watched, appalled, she tore it up and tossed letter after letter into a blazing Indian brazier at her side. Weeks could only imagine what a loss to future scholarship might be involved as the letters went up in flames. They might have been letters from the great Bernard Berenson, or from any of the other protégés and friends whom she had entertained and with whom she had corresponded over the years: Pablo Casals, to whom she left a cello in her will, Sargent, Zorn, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, and of course the faithless Frank Crawford. Up in flames went all their words to her, while Weeks tried to lift a shaking teacup to his lips. All she wanted to be remembered for, it seemed, was her museum.

  Of course the burning-the-letters scene that afternoon would later turn out to be a typical example of Gardner melodramatic stagecraft. Weeks certainly watched her burn some letters, but hardly all of them were commended to the flames. Left safely in her museum archives were some six thousand others, including four hundred and sixty-four from Berenson, more than two hundred from Sargent, a hundred from Henry James, and ninety-eight from Crawford. The property that now constitutes the museum was left in her will to seven individual trustees, along with a $1,200,000 endowment fund to maintain and support it. (The Gardner Museum is now open six days and one evening a week, and though there is no fixed admission charge a voluntary contribution is requested at the door.) In her will, she stipulated that the trustees must not move a single stick of furniture—not a chair, not a table, not a doily—from where she had placed it, and red marks were painted on the floor to indicate precisely where each item went. She also stipulated that if at any time anything was added to the galleries, or if the “general disposition or arrangement” of any articles was changed, the museum and all its contents were to be sold and the proceeds to go to Harvard.