biography
| name: |
Gardner, Isabella Stewart
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1840–1924)
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| biography:
| Art collector, born in New York City, New York, USA. The daughter of David Stewart, a wealthy New York City importer and mining investor, she was schooled privately, toured Europe (1856–8), and married John Lowell Gardner (1860) with his proper Bostonian pedigree. She settled in Boston but was not accepted by its old society. When the death of her two-year-old son (1865) was followed by a miscarriage, she and her husband went to Europe. After they returned (1868), ‘Mrs Jack’ soon established herself as the most flamboyant and sought-after hostess in Boston. At first her energies went into entertaining, interior decoration, gardening, travelling, and collecting friends and odds-and-ends, but by the late 1880s she set out seriously to collect great art. Assisted by (and subsidizing) Bernard Berenson, newly graduated from Harvard College, she began to purchase mainly works of the European Renaissance. (She had inherited a large fortune when her father died in 1891.) To house her growing collection, she built an ambitious Italianate palazzo, Fenway Court. Incorporated as the semi-private Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (1902), it was opened to the first select guests in 1903. She continued to add objects over the next few years, and stipulated that everything must stay exactly where she placed it. Regarded as somewhere between an exotic aesthete and a Jamesian heroine, she defined herself with her oft-quoted motto, ‘C'est mon plaisir’. |
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