Chasing Beauty, page 49
he “only half liked”: HJ to Elizabeth Boott, June 4, 1884, as quoted by Fairbrother, “The Shock,” 94.
leaving painting altogether: Tóibín, “Secrets,” 117–18.
“I am rejoiced”: GAG to JLG Jr., December 20, 1886, GFP.
niece by marriage: Selah Strong Smith and Ann Carpenter had nine children, including Adelia Smith Stewart (Belle’s mother) and Mary Ann Smith (Hicks), who married John Mott Hicks, the parents of Mary Smith Hicks Peck. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Research Report Case: C20190206A (Dykstra), May 2019. This second Stewart marriage is characterized in ISGAL as an “uncomfortable overlap,” linking it to the absence of David Stewart in the museum collection. See ISGAL, 26–27.
conveyed the title: Financial Records, ISG Papers, ISGM.
Venice and Florence: Jack listed all purchases in the last pages of his travel diaries, noting the place, date, and price of each item. JLG Jr. 1886 Diary, JLGJr-P.
Paris and London: Both Carter and Tharp claim it was on this 1886 trip that Whistler gave Belle his sketches for his famed 1877 Peacock Room (later reinstalled at the Freer Gallery of Art), so-called because of the artist’s use of the peacock as both a figure in various scenes throughout the room and as a design motif. This was not the case. Whistler gave them to the American painter Harper Pennington in roughly 1885; Pennington then gave them to Belle in 1904. She would include them in the Sargent/Whistler Case in the Long Gallery. Belle had a particular fondness for peacocks and would acquire more representations of the flamboyant bird. For more about the drawings, see Rollin van N. Hadley, ed., Drawings: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, 1968), 37–41.
a “whirl of hurry”: Whistler to ISG (likely October 1886), ISG Papers, ISGM.
“a more brilliant proof”: Whistler to ISG (likely later October 1886), ISG Papers, ISGM.
spilling over its rim: Belle bought a third Whistler pastel, Lapis Lazuli, executed the same year as the first two, in 1895 from the artist. It pictured a nude woman lounging on a blue couch, her robe open, with an outstretched hand holding an open fan. She put all three pastels, together with the small oil, lined up in a vertical row in the Veronese Room of Fenway Court. See ISGM Guide 17, 147.
“looked very handsome”: JLG Jr. to GPG, February 8, 1887, GFP.
found Belle “not easy”: As quoted in Nancy Whipple Grinnell, Carrying the Torch: Maud Howe Elliott and the American Renaissance (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2014), 60–61. Grinnell later mentions the rift between the friends but does not speculate as to the reasons. Carrying, 111–12.
Belle inscribed the inside: Annie Fields, A Week Away from Time (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887). A copy can be found in ISG Personal Library, ISGM.
She had met: This meeting can be dated from several sources, including a letter from Berenson to Belle from Munich, dated July 28, 1897, in which he writes: “It fully confirmed my first impression of you, eleven years ago, and since then I have lived and seen much.” ISG/BB Letters, 91–92.
“Berenson has more”: Cohen, 46.
thoroughgoing anti-Semitism: Cohen traces this prejudice at Harvard and within the field of art history. She also notes that Berenson converted to Christianity at Trinity Church, inspired by the preaching of its rector, Phillips Brooks, but also his desire to escape his origins. Cohen, 46–49.
on the lower left: For a close reading of this display case, see Riley, “To Make a Case,” 166–68.
his attentions on canvas: See especially Richard Ormond’s introductory essay, “Sargent and the Arts,” in Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2015), 9–21; Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “Sargent’s Other Portraits,” Raritan 36, no. 1 (2016): 114–37.
course of his commission: Tharp, 131. The chronology in Sargent’s catalogue raisonné does not say Sargent stayed with the Gardners, only that he took a studio on nearby Exeter Street and that he began her portrait at the end of December 1887. Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurry, John Singer Sargent: The Early Portraits, Complete Paintings, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), xvi. See also Erica E. Hirshler, “Sargent in Boston and New York, 1888–1912: Venn Diagrams,” in Ormond, Sargent: Portraits, 173–77; and Hirshler, Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting (Boston: MFA Publications, 2009), 132.
“the gymnasium door”: Ellery Sedgwick, The Happy Profession (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946), 60–61.
in this heated scene: Sargent’s sexual life was kept hidden, out of preference or necessity, most probably both. For a full and nuanced discussion, see Paul Fisher, A Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022).
Ned Boit didn’t make: Boit Papers, Diaries for 1887–88, Archives of American Art, roll 83, as cited in Subject Files, ISGM.
in the painting itself: For how the portrait shows influences from Asia, see Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, “Mrs. Gardner’s Renaissance,” Fenway Court: Imaging the Self in Renaissance Italy (Boston: ISGM, 1990–91), 21.
an emotional remove: Colm Tóibín notices how Sargent “developed a way of making his subjects seem both close and distant. His way of painting a face appeared to capture a vivid sense of life while also managing to depict a fine detachment.” Henry James and American Painting, 38.
as “translucent alabaster”: Gertrude Fay to Rollin Van N. Hadley, October 14, 1976, Rollin Hadley Papers, ISGM.
“a lemon with a slit”: Lucia Fairchild recorded Sargent’s comment about Isabella in her diaries, which are in part reprinted in Lucia Miller, “John Singer Sargent in Diaries of Lucia Fairchild 1890 and 1891,” Archives of American Art Journal 26, no. 4 (1986), 6.
“had been done”: Carter, 104–5.
Woman, An Enigma: For an extended discussion of the portrait and its title, see Weil-Garris Brandt, “Mrs. Gardner’s Renaissance,” 15–18. See also “Art in Boston: The Sargent Portrait Exhibition at St. Botolph Club,” Art Amateur (April 1888): 110; “Exhibition of Mr. Sargent’s Paintings at the St. Botolph Club,” Boston Evening Transcript, January 30, 1888. The Table Gossip section of the Boston Daily Globe reported that over “5000 people, by actual count, visited the Botolph Club while the Sargent portraits were on exhibition.” February 19, 1888
“slightly ‘uncanny’ spectacle”: Henry James, The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, ed. John L. Sweeney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 218.
“You must let me”: Frances Lang to ISG, January 30, 1889, ISG Papers, ISGM. The transcription of this letter surmises that the date was 1889.
was “cut very low”: Town Topics, n.d., likely February 1888.
required “more dignity”: “Art in Boston,” 110.
in Boston: “The newspapers”: JSS to ISG (possibly 1888), ISG Papers, ISGM.
time to “gain pause”: Susan Hale, Boston Sunday Globe, February 19, 1888.
“It looks like hell”: JLG Jr. to ISG in an undated letter, copied by Morris Carter, MC Papers; on October 10, 1894, Jack sent a cablegram from Venice, declining a request by an unnamed correspondent to exhibit Sargent’s portrait of Isabella. JLG Jr., 1894 Travel Diary, JLGJr-P.
FOURTEEN: SEEING WONDER, 1888–89
“What a wonderful”: HJ to ISG, March 18, 1888, ISG Papers, ISGM.
traveled before to Spain: Richard L. Kagan reviews the literature written about Spain by a range of English-speaking writers, including Irving, in The Spanish Craze: America’s Fascination with the Hispanic World, 1779–1939 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 133–48.
the “rugged mountains”: Washington Irving, The Alhambra: A Series of Tales and Sketches of the Moors and Spaniards (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1861; originally published in 1849), 14.
published in 1845: Richard Ford, A Handbook for Travellers in Spain, 6th ed., vols. 1 and 2 (London: John Murray, 1882). Jack signed his name in the first volume; copy in ISG Personal Library, ISGM. Isabella purchased copies of the original 1845 edition in London in 1888.
She pasted photographs: Travel Albums: Volume I, Spain, 1888, and Volume II, Spain and Portugal, 1888.
“the greatest painter”: Ford, Handbook, 47.
realism and humanity: Richard Ormand, “Sargent’s El Jaleo,” Fenway Court (1970), 4. Peter Schjeldahl poses a question: “Why is Velázquez almost certainly the greatest of painters? . . . No other artist has taken both the representational and the decorative functions of painting to such dizzying heights. Velázquez’s fusion of truth and beauty can be felt up close, in art’s most caressing and efficient brushstroke. And it registers with equal force from a certain distance—the viewpoint at which the strokes snap into a stunning likeness of the subject, and innumerable colors (most of them blacks and grays) clear their throats and sing. A Velázquez says, ‘This is so.’ And we know it’s true.” “The Spanish Lesson,” The New Yorker, November 10, 2002.
“Velázquez, Velázquez”: Carolus-Duran, as quoted in H. Barbara Weinberg, “American Artists’ Taste for Spanish Painting,” Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), 295.
unhurried brushstrokes: Jonathan Brown and Carmen Garrido, Velázquez: The Technique of Genius (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 174–80.
a person alive: About Velázquez Peter Schjeldahl says simply: “He conquered time . . . Work by work, Velázquez perpetuates a present tense of reality into a future that is imminent, always.” “The Reign in Spain,” The New Yorker, January 2, 2012.
“Her quick eyesight”: MC Papers.
lower right corner: The Neapolitan baroque painter Luca Giordano called Velázquez’s supreme masterpiece, “Las Meninas” (1656), which depicts Philip’s daughter the Infanta Margarita and her attendants, “the theology of painting.” As quoted in The New Yorker, January 2, 2012.
“this painting accepts”: Laura Cumming, The Vanishing Velázquez, 5–6. For a summary of the many ways this painting has been interpreted, see also Brown, Velázquez: Technique, 181–94.
the “strong tincture”: William Howe Downes, as quoted in Hirshler, Sargent’s Daughters, 203.
“one of his most”: Ford, HandBook, 58.
“I write to you from Seville”: Ralph Curtis to ISG, February 9, 1888, ISG Papers, ISGM.
“One who has not seen”: Travel Album: Spain and Portugal, Volume II, 1888.
“enough of bullfights”: JLG Jr. to GPG, April 29, 1888, GFP.
spectacle was “tremendous”: JLG Jr. to GPG, May 29, 1888, GFP. See also Carter, 106–7. The Gardners were strong supporters of several anti-cruelty organizations in Boston, including the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
old master painting: Inscribed below the Virgin’s foot was a shortened version, in Latin lettering, of Genesis 2:10: “And a river went out of Eden to water the garden . . .” This was discovered in 1940, when considerable overpainting and varnish were removed from the canvas. In Isabella’s time, this part of the painting was filled with puffy clouds. Philip Hendy, European and American Paintings in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston: Trustees of the ISGM, 1974), 300.
“Your Aunt bought”: JLG Jr. to GPG, May 24, 1888, GFP. Jack gives further details about the painting: it “was shipped on a sailing vessel for New York . . . I also enclose the receipts of the seller of the picture in which he states the period at which it was painted. This may be necessary to enable you to get it through without duty as an old painting. When it arrives, please send it to my house.” See also Carter, 107; Tharp, 138.
“What is most”: Travel Album: Spain and Portugal, Volume II, 1888; Ford, Handbook, 377. For an in-depth discussion of the Spain albums, see Madeleine Haddon, “Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Travel Albums from Spain,” Fellow Wanderer, 55–69.
“The severe, simple”: Ford, Handbook, 372.
“And there is no conqueror”: Ford, Handbook, 374. See also Irving, Alhambra, 70.
“Your energetic Aunt”: JLG Jr. to GPG, April 29, 1888, GFP.
“travelling and sightseeing”: JLG Jr. to GPG, May 24, 1888, GFP.
“At last we have”: JLG Jr. to GAG, June 13, 1888, GFP.
writers, and hangers-on: Daniel Curtis recorded the guest list for a typical soiree in his diary: “JL Gardners, Idita de Hurtado and her husband, Marchese Bentivoglio d’Aragona, Princess da Montenegro, Mrs. Paffius, Mocenigo, the S. Howes, Dr. Clotaldo Pincco, R. Browning, Wm Rh Coolidge, &c, &c.” Daniel Curtis Diary, no. 449, July 17, 1888, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, Italy.
the “season is over”: JLG Jr. to GPG, July 3, 1888, GFP.
“trust your eye”: Carter, 110.
“with motion and light”: She installed the fireplace in the music room at Green Hill, where it was often lit for musical performances, and later in the Raphael Room on the second floor of Fenway Court. See Gilbert Wendell Longstreet and Morris Carter, General Catalogue (Boston, Printed for the Trustees, 1935), 118.
FIFTEEN: “DAZZLING,” 1889
“Tonight is the night”: Ellen Coolidge to Frances Curtis, April 26, 1889, Curtis Family Papers, 1766-2000, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
The “social atmosphere”: Saturday Evening Gazette, April 1889.
“La Primavera by Botticelli”: Ellen Coolidge to Frances Curtis, April 26, 1889, Curtis Family Papers, Schlesinger.
“fine, old tapestries”: “Boston’s Fancy Ball,” New York Times, April 26, 1889.
Boston’s high society: Boston Daily Globe listed all the women on the dais: “Mrs. Martin Brimmer, Mrs. W. F. Apthorp, Mrs. Edward Codman, Mrs. Samuel Eliot, Mrs. J. L. Gardner, Mrs. William W. Greenough, Mrs. R. P. Hallowell, Mrs. B. J. Lang, Mrs. C. G. Loring, Mrs. A. L. Mason, Mrs. Edward Robinson, Mrs. F. P. Vinton and Mrs. Henry Whitman.” Boston Daily Globe, April 27, 1889.
with his Merry Men: Isabella collected photographs of the evening, which included two of Johns and Bunker; Dennis Miller Bunker as a Troubadour at the Boston Art Students’ Association Ball, 1889; and Clayton Johns in Costume, 19th century, ISG Photographs, ISGM.
review titled “Fairyland”: Boston Daily Globe, April 27, 1889.
helped supply costumes: Ruth Cabot recounted to Frances Curtis that Isabella had suggested a Cabot relative go to the ball as Primavera by Botticelli. March 30, 1889, Curtis Family Papers, Schlesinger.
There’d been gossip: Isabella Curtis to Frances Curtis, April 15, 1889, Curtis Family Papers, Schlesinger.
most “successful beauty”: HA to Elizabeth Cameron, May 2, 1889, HA Letters, vol. 3, 173.
feature of student albums: See Anthony Calnek, The Hasty Pudding Theatre: A History of Harvard’s Hairy-Chested Heroines (Cambridge: The Hasty Pudding Club, 1986); see also Anna Clutterbuck-Cook, “Miss Nathan Appleton Takes the Stage,” Object of the Month blog, MHS, June 2019.
“our historical other selves”: “The Artists Festival,” Saturday Evening Gazette, 1889.
Vienna Opera in 1884: John N. Burk, “Wilhelm Gericke: A Centennial Retrospect,” Musical Quarterly 31, no. 2 (April 1945), 16–87.
Now the program: Carter, 114–15.
In February 1889: Carter, 113.
court-concerts in March: Carter, 115.
“high life” might be: Envelope, to ISG, date indecipherable, ISG Papers, ISGM.
“Heretofore,” the paper noted: “Mrs. Jack’s Latest Lions,” n.p., December 30, 1896.
“Mrs. Jack’s Latest Lion”: “Mrs. Jack’s Latest Lion,” Boston Sunday Post, January 31, 1897. See also ISGAL, 12–15.
“cozily tucked up beside”: As quoted in Tharp, 155.
“there are all sorts”: ISG to Mrs. Aldrich, October 8, 1888, ISG Papers, ISGM.
to make a redingote: Charles Frederick Worth for the House of Worth, fancy dress, late 1880s, early 1890s. Silk velvet with embroidery and beading, Peabody Essex Museum, gift of Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1923 (116746).
what they might miss: Carter, 115.
“She’s a will o’ wisp”: Carter, 34.
brother, John Jr.: The best overview of Bunker and his work is by Erica E. Hirshler in Dennis Miller Bunker: American Impressionist (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1994), 18–89.
down to the chair: I thank Shana McKenna for pointing out this similarity. Isabella would own her own Moroni when she bought his Portrait of a Bearded Man in Black (1576) in 1895. La Dama in Rosso (1556–60) was purchased by the National Gallery in London in 1876.
SIXTEEN: IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS, 1890–91
“Travelling must be”: BB to ISG, September 12, 1888, ISG/BB Letters, 26.
“You must see”: JSS to ISG, March 1890, as quoted in Carter, 117.
“On stage, the torsal”: Town Topics, April 3, 1890, a gossip newspaper published in New York, as quoted in “Notes on John Singer Sargent in New York, 1888–1890,” Archives of American Art Journal 22, no. 4, 1982, 31.
“paint a portrait or two”: JSS to ISG, February 28, 1890, ISG Papers, ISGM. See also Carter, 117–18.
sort of “rude gesture”: Corinna Lindon Smith, Interesting People: Eighty Years with the Great and the Near-Great (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 118.
“world-renowned pas-seul”: As quoted in Tharp, 145.
“Whoever heard”: As quoted in Carter, 118.
“New England conscience”: ISG to BB, August 18, 1896, ISG/BB Letters, 63.
“intensely respectable”: HJ to ISG, June 24, 1890, HJ/Zorzi, 154.
“most important churches”: Carter, 120.
London: “Aunty Belle”: GAG to GPG, undated, GFP.
relief: “Installed at”: JLG Jr. 1890 Diary, JLGJr-P.
rooms were “delightful”: JLG Jr. to GPG, August 5, 1890, GFP.
“an enchanting dream”: JLG Jr. to GPG, August 30, 1890, GFP.
“my books don’t sell”: HJ to Robert Louis Stevenson, January 12, 1891, HJ Letters, vol. 3, 326.
“snatch of Venice”: HJ to ISG, June 24, 1890, HJ Letters, vol. 3, 294.
“building hospitals”: Clayton Johns, Reminiscences of a Musician (Cambridge: Washburn and Thomas, 1929), 65.
