Isabella Stewart Gardner

UXL Newsmakers, (2005)

Isabella Stewart Gardner

For decades, Bostonians followed newspaper accounts chronicling the globe-trotting exploits and extensive art collecting of one of the city's most iconoclastic characters, Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924). Gardner and her husband amassed over 2,500 works of art, many of them near-priceless treasures. All of them reside inside her former home, a lavish Italianate villa known as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Gardner was born on April 14, 1840 in New York City. She was the first daughter of David Stewart, a second-generation Scottish-American, and Adelia Smith, whose father had owned a tavern and stable at Old Ferry, Brooklyn. The Stewart family fortune came from a mining and iron business in Pennsylvania. However, her father had grown up near Jamaica, Long Island, New York, on a farm which his daughter would come to love during visits to her formidable paternal grandmother, to whom she was compared as a child because of her own headstrong ways. Called "Belle" as a young girl, Gardner spent much of her childhood in the genteel "Old New York" society chronicled in the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James, both of whom she knew later as an adult. The family lived in a three-story townhouse at 10 University Place, near Washington Square Park. A sister and two brothers followed. She was educated at small private schools in the neighborhood for girls of affluent families.

Gardner's pleasant youth was marred by the death of her eleven-year-old sister Adelia, who was two years her junior. In the mid-1850s, it was decided that Belle should attend a finishing school in Paris, and her parents came with her. They socialized with other Americans living there, including the Gardners of Boston, one of that city's most prominent families. A ship-owning clan, the Gardners had two daughters at the same Paris school. When her term was finished, Gardner traveled to Rome, where she enjoyed visiting museums and Roman ruins. She made the most of her time in Europe, acquiring languages with ease as well as an entirely new wardrobe, and returned home a vivacious dance partner. Gardner was not a great beauty: she had red hair, very fair skin, and portraits show her as quite thin at a time when voluptuousness was in fashion, but she was quick-witted and an engaging conversationalist.

Those charms attracted the attention of 21-year-old John Lowell Gardner, her friend Julia's older brother, on an 1859 visit to Boston. Known as "Jack," he dropped out of Harvard College to enter the family business, and was considered one of the city's most eligible bachelors. After a brief engagement, they were married at Grace Church in New York on April. 10, 1860. They began life as newlyweds in Boston, soon acquiring a home in the prestigious Back Bay neighborhood where the city's wealthiest families lived. Gardner was snubbed socially, however, because of her Paris-made dresses and New York vivacity, both of which were out of place in a Boston society still ruled by descendants of the Puritan founders.

Endured Several Tragedies

For almost forty years, Gardner lived at 152 Beacon Street, the Back Bay's poshest street, in a five-floor French townhouse with a mansard roof and a wine cellar. Other members of the Gardner clan lived nearby. However, two had married Southerners, and the outbreak of the American Civil War brought several stressful years to the family. Gardner, known for her wit, later claimed to have been too young to remember this era. In 1863, the Gardners became parents to a boy, John Lowell Gardner III, on whom they both doted. But "Jackie" died of pneumonia before his second birthday, which devastated his mother. Later that year, her sister-in-law died in childbirth, and Gardner suffered a near-fatal miscarriage herself soon afterward.

Mired in grief for many months, Gardner finally heeded the suggestion of her doctor to sail for Europe. She and her husband departed in the spring of 1867. They traveled as far as Moscow, but spent much of their time in Paris. Returning to Boston in the fall of 1868, Gardner became intensely involved in a number of cultural activities in the city. She also bought her first painting, an Emile Jacques landscape depicting some sheep under a tree, from Boston dealers Doll and Richards in 1873. After an extensive 1874 trip to the Middle East, the Gardners returned to Boston when her husband's widowed brother, Joseph Gardner, passed away. They became parents to their three orphaned nephews. With the boys engaged in typically rigorous academic training in preparation for Harvard, Gardner took a keen interest in their schoolwork, and quickly came to realize that her own education had been sorely inadequate. She began reading extensively and attending lectures at Harvard by an eminent art historian, Charles Eliot Norton. The two became fast friends. It was Norton who suggested that Gardner take up collecting rare books in earnest. One her first purchases was a set of volumes by Dante Aligheri.