Chasing Beauty, page 29
Isabella visited a host of dealers and antique shops. The receipt from the dealer Francesco Dorigo, for instance, lists her many purchases, including an antique wellhead or basin, an inset relief of a winged ox, a gracefully carved fragment of a sixteenth-century fireplace apron, and a large stone portal, with the inscription Ave Maria Gratia Plena. She also ordered the fabrication of the three-story marble staircase from Dorigo.
West Side View of Courtyard Stairs and Columns, Album: 152 Beacon Street and Fenway Court, 1900–22, Thomas E. Marr and Son, 1902, gelatin silver print.
Two weeks in Rome after leaving Venice were followed by a brief stay in Genoa—she gave Berenson no reason for her comment “how I hate Genoa.” After arriving in Paris, Isabella spent time with Henry Adams, who had found refuge in the city after his wife’s death by suicide almost fifteen years before. With Adams, she talked of medieval art and the best books to buy on the subject, and they took a side trip to Chartres to see its jewel-like cathedral, the topic of his later book. Adams noted to a friend, with a tinge of envy, how Isabella that summer had bought up “all the gems she could find in Europe.”
After meeting Whistler on a stop in London, she traveled to Rye for a brief visit with Henry James. He gossiped with Charles Eliot Norton about meeting Isabella at Dover “to see all her Van Eycks and Rubenses through the Customs and bring her hither, where three water-colours and four photographs of the Rye School will let her down easily.” He called her paintings her “spoils.” What Henry James meant by three watercolors and four photographs is not entirely clear, but his jealousy of her “spoils” is plainer, with a sly reference to his recently published novella, The Spoils of Poynton, about another aging Mrs. G (Mrs. Gereth) with an old house full of “valuable things.” James admired Isabella for her individuality and taste but envied her money and the power it conferred. A mocking tone was the best way to diminish some of that power; it was even easier to dismiss a woman’s power by making reference to her age.
Back in London, Isabella was laid low by a sore throat and a hacking cough, which required, according to her London doctor, recovery at the spa in Bournemouth, where Henry James’s sister, Alice, had often gone to convalesce. Isabella hated being there. Sick and lonely, she also dreaded the long voyage home, especially without Jack.
She got back to Boston in mid-December. The “din and the worry” of everything she had set in motion with Fenway Court had to be faced, and her rooms at 152 Beacon Street were too quiet. On Christmas Day, she packed up her roast turkey and cranberry sauce and escaped to Green Hill to dine “in peace” and spend the night, accompanied only by her maid, Ella. As solace, she had a view of the tall trees out of her bedroom window, with a glimpse of the city beyond.
***
ISABELLA RALLIED IN THE NEW YEAR, THE ONE IN WHICH SHE’D CELEBRATE her sixtieth birthday. “Keep well,” she wrote to Berenson, adding a line to gather her courage that might also count as one of her creeds: “keep always the power to work. That is the best of all things.”
One task she set for herself in these early months was to document her collection in a more thoroughgoing way, a task she found “very slow work.” She had much information already—Jack’s many lists of their purchases and her own lists of which artworks she kept in which house. Now she wanted to illustrate this documentation with black-and-white photographs—she would use those she had purchased for her travel albums as well as photographs that Berenson had included with his written descriptions of whatever work he was offering her. She asked Berenson to send any information he might know about the provenance of the pictures she had bought through him. “Don’t let all this make you cross! I want to be thoroughly au courant.” On the front page of a large album, she pasted a rather fanciful rendering of its title: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the Fenway. This is most likely the first time she put in writing the official name of the museum, which during her lifetime would be referred to as Fenway Court.
In these same months, she had the idea—Berenson called it a “jolly idea”—of showing part of her collection arranged in several rooms on the first floor of 152 Beacon Street to an interested paying public. The three-day event in late March would raise money for the building fund of the Industrial School for Crippled Children (now the Cotting School). She charged two dollars for morning tickets and three for an afternoon tour. Her scheme proved wildly popular. She bragged to Berenson that all the tickets had sold out, and over forty people had to be turned away. She ended up raising $1,500. She turned her home into a museum as she was making a museum to be her home. The Boston Globe’s review of the event declared 152 Beacon Street the “Mecca of fashionable Boston,” noting that hers was “a collection worth going many miles to see.”
THESE EFFORTS, HOWEVER, WERE RELATIVELY MINOR COMPARED TO THE task that consumed her waking hours—the enormously complex project on the Fenway. Henry Swift took over the day-to-day money management in July 1900, replacing her nephew George Peabody Gardner. Swift, a lawyer whose own business interests did not take up all his time, was tall and elegant and spoke with a noticeably high voice. Isabella immediately liked him, calling him “my man of business.” The architect Willard T. Sears noted this switch in his diary but gave no further explanation; likely this change in roles helped smooth the family waters. Isabella intended to supervise every step of the construction, and she was relentless. Some weeks she went almost daily to the worksite, clambering over scaffolding and climbing ladders to get a better view. She carried a lunch pail and ate her meal at noon, like the rest of the workers. She contributed ten cents for raw oatmeal, which was added to the tank of drinking water to keep it fresh.
She had very specific ideas about every aspect of the building, from footings to rooftop. For instance, she insisted on a design for the foundation that differed from the typical. She wanted the dressed foundation stone, clearly visible above ground, to run the length of the wall, in a straight line. She decided that the foundation’s design would follow Italian methods, by which undressed stone of various heights is combined with brick, so the building doesn’t seem to float on top of the stone. Instead, the two parts appear to be woven together. This would be the first attempt at this sort of foundation in America, and there was concern initially from all quarters that it might not work on the Fenway’s marshy land. Isabella, however, prevailed.
Hundreds of wooden cases, packed with treasures from her recent travels in Europe, arrived at a large storage facility near the harbor, and she oversaw the unpacking of each case. Every stone or column or capital or sculpture had to be numbered and checked against the shipping list, sorted, then transferred again to one of two large storage sheds built next to the worksite.
Tensions were running high by late summer 1900, when it was time for the marble columns along the perimeter of the inner courtyard to be set in concrete. Isabella had already clashed with two highly skilled stonecutters about the installation of the large stone doorway at the front of the building. The first, John Evans, renowned for his work on Boston’s Trinity Church, quit in frustration, telling Sears he “would not be bothered with her anymore,” given how she had treated his crew. His replacement, Mr. Sullivan, fared little better; within weeks, Isabella refused to accept his work. Sullivan was furious, and she wanted him fired. Both relented after Sears intervened. Skilled craftsmen, he pleaded to her, were exceedingly hard to find.
Now, in September, the marble columns—of differing colors and finishes and diameters—were ready to be ferried from the harbor to the worksite. Kodak snapshots, likely taken by Isabella herself, with her box camera, convey something of the hubbub of the scene: the workmen uncrating the columns wrapped in protective burlap; their maneuvering of the enormous stylobate lion of Carrara marble into place; the construction debris and the mud.
Fenway Court During Construction: Stylobate Lion, Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1900, gelatin silver print.
At every step, she fought with Sears and the city authorities about what she could and could not do. Captain John Damrell, the city’s building inspector, was her particular nemesis, especially regarding the use of steel, which his office required in buildings of a certain size, to ensure stability and to reduce fire hazard. She didn’t want to use any steel. If Italians could build palazzi that lasted for centuries, surely she could do likewise. She wanted authenticity. But the concern was twofold: the interior spaces in the design were too large for wooden construction without steel support, and imported marble columns might not have sufficient tensile strength for the weight of a four-story structure. She explained the situation to Berenson in March: “I am fighting with architects and city government because I won’t have ‘Steel Construction’—so I may have to end by having nothing!” She finally relented to having a small marble sample tested by engineers at the Watertown Arsenal. She also allowed some marble columns to be hollowed out and filled with a steel core and made other concessions for steel trusses.
Later, Isabella loved to regale listeners with stories of these battles, relishing especially one exchange with Damrell. “I am well aware that you can stop my building,” she had told him. “But in view of what that would mean to Boston, I think it would be folly for you to do so; if however, Fenway Court is to be built at all, it will be built as I wish and not as you wish.”
No detail escaped her. When the large wooden beams for the ceiling of the third-floor Gothic Room didn’t look sufficiently rough-hewn and medieval, she took an ax to a beam herself to mark it in the way she’d remembered from one of her trips. The workmen sputtered and stammered as she chopped, desperate that she not cut off her foot with the heavy ax, but they followed her example in shaping the rest of the ceiling beams. A similar scenario played out with the high interior walls of the courtyard. The first efforts of the painters working on the surface did not meet her standards. So she got on a ladder herself. She dipped a large sponge in a pail of pink paint and then into a pail of white paint and showed the painters how to daub the mixture onto the wall to mimic the marble of Venetian palazzi.
Isabella had in mind the perfect wall color for several rooms: a shade of deep blue used in the sculpture showroom of Stefano Bardini, an antiquities dealer in Florence. She asked Berenson in March 1900 to “get on a piece of paper the blue colour that Bardini has on his walls. I want the exact tint.” Maybe, she speculated, someone could “paint it on a piece of paper.” A half year later she asked about it again, reminding Berenson to “get me a piece of paper painted with the blue of Bardini’s walls. You know you promised this before. I am working hard over my new house.” He made a few excuses for his delay, then quickly sent a sample, along with the recipe for creating it.
***
SOMETIMES ISABELLA’S ATTENTION TO DETAIL NARROWED INTO CAPRICIOUSNESS. Sears’s diary is littered with these moments, from the start of the project to its finish. She despaired at the ineptitude or inefficiency of on-site workers. She canceled, on the spot, a builder’s contract for oak floors because he was late in delivering the supplies; she fired a plumber when his work displeased her. A cycle developed: she would approve a design element or a fabrication, Sears would instruct the workmen, she would inspect the work, and then she would insist that no, she had not given her approval. Or she said she had changed her mind. Walls went up one day; the same walls were torn down the next. It seems that Sears kept his temper, even in his diary, but he protected himself by writing down what she said and did. He also hired an able and genial assistant, Edward Nichols, whom he sent to Fenway Court as needed to meet with Isabella and mediate disputes.
Labor relations also improved due to the many skills of Teobaldo Travi, an Italian immigrant whom one of the contractors had hired. Everyone called him by his nickname, “Bolgi.” Not only did he have an intimate knowledge of the building materials and methods of his native country, but he and Gardner could talk in Italian together. He humored her and understood her. He protected workmen from her wrath, just as Jack Gardner had done when she lost her temper with their servants from time to time. Isabella soon elevated Bolgi to overseer of architectural materials—their transport and installation. He became the de facto foreman, and together they came up with a scheme to communicate with the rest of the crew. He would play his coronet according to a code: “one toot for mason; two for the steam-fitter, three for the plumber; four for the carpenter; five for the plasterer; six for the painter.”
***
WITH FENWAY COURT ISABELLA WAS ATTEMPTING SOMETHING SUI GENERIS. She could not talk with a friend to ask how an art museum is built and run. Her accomplishment seems inevitable after the fact, but from her point of view at the time, it was far from that. The expense of it all alarmed her. Maybe this time she had aimed too high. At moments she despaired that things might fall apart altogether. As she exclaimed to Berenson, after yet another frustrating tussle, “This ungrateful America, with its tariff and building laws and petty ignorant officials is fast persuading me to give up the whole Museum idea. Every man’s hand is against me . . .”
She was a woman on her own, a fact she sometimes felt keenly. When the city wanted to install a streetlamp and a hydrant on her property, she exclaimed to Henry Swift, “It is always the same old story of the lone woman who is taken advantage of.” On December 1, 1900, she and six others gathered to incorporate the museum. Around the table sat her newly minted board of directors: Harold Jefferson Coolidge, William Amory Gardner, John Chipman Gray, Charles L. Pierson, Willard T. Sears, and Henry Swift. They were all family and friends—associates who had earned her trust. They agreed to constitute a corporation with bylaws and a charter that stated its aims: “for the purpose of art education, especially by the public exhibition of works of art.” In shares of ten dollars each, capital stock was set at $50,000. Isabella was, of course, the only woman at the table.
Certainly simpler options had been available to her. One way to put her treasures on view for the public would be to donate them to Harvard College or the Museum of Fine Arts, as had the avid Boston collector Susan D. Warren. Mrs. Potter Palmer, whom Isabella had met at the 1893 exposition, would give her entire collection to the Art Institute of Chicago. If Isabella had done this, the professionals would have decided how to display the objects she had so carefully acquired. Donating such a collection signaled the taste, social status, and wealth of the giver, but not more. And Isabella wanted more, far more, than a wall plaque to honor a donation.
***
ISABELLA MOVED TO THE TOP FLOOR OF FENWAY COURT IN THE EARLY winter of 1901. The interior of the building, including her apartment, wasn’t finished yet. She had insisted the workmen re-create her bedroom as it had been on Beacon Street. Her first night at Fenway Court was December 19. The next morning the workmen placed the Medusa mosaic in the courtyard floor. To celebrate the holiday season and to mark this moment, she held a midnight service in the third-floor chapel in the museum’s southeast corner. The rector of the Church of the Advent officiated, an occasion that must have brought some familiar spiritual comfort. Candlelight illuminated the extraordinary Bardini Blue on the chapel walls, the color of an evening sky. A sixteenth-century choir stall from Venice, which Isabella had bought through Daniel Curtis, lined one wall. High above the large window at the front of the chapel, she placed her first old master purchase, the Madonna by Zurbarán, which she had acquired on her 1888 trip to Spain—a painting that had, in a way, started it all. (She moved this painting to the first-floor Spanish Chapel in 1915.)
Five years before she had written to Berenson, “I think I shall call my museum the Borgo Allegro—the very thought of it is such a joy.” Now, on Christmas Eve, she wrote him a greeting: “I send a dear little Kodak of my new house. Please like it. The proportions are wonderful. Quite the best I know.” She would take the whole next year to design and furnish each gallery, putting one object next to another, a chair here or a carpet there, then probably standing back to take in the whole view. Soon the process would start again, as she moved objects until their arrangement pleased her.
Soon after finishing, she asked the Boston architecture and landscape photographer Thomas E. Marr to photograph Fenway Court’s galleries and individual artworks. As early as 1900, Marr had documented Isabella’s homes at 152 Beacon Street and at Green Hill. He had a particular “command of lighting,” as the photography scholar Casey Riley rightly notes. Whether photographing Isabella’s domestic rooms, conservatories, and gardens, masterpiece paintings, or her monumental gallery spaces, his images convey—in Riley’s phrase—both “visual scale and material details.” His use of the silver gelatin printing process made his images seem to shimmer. Now Isabella secured a visual record of what she had accomplished at Fenway Court, one she would continue updating with an eye toward safeguarding her legacy.
For her, the collection in its entirety, not simply individual objects, was what made meaning, like words gathered in a sentence. She had a reputation as a wonderful letter writer, with lines full of wit and surprise. Anders Zorn once told her that “your letters make me love life.” But the world she built at Fenway Court was made not of words but of stone and color and flower and paint and object. In the furnishing of each room, she would reveal the chambers of her own heart.
Courtyard, Fenway Court, Thomas E. Marr and Son, Album: Fenway Court, 1902–22, gelatin silver print on paper.
Twenty-Four
God Is in the Details
