page_title: Isabella Stewart Gardner
section_title: Travel and collecting
hierarchical_section_title: Isabella Stewart Gardner / Travel and collecting
context_page_description: Isabella Stewart Gardner was a leading American art collector, philanthropist, and patron of the arts. She founded the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
  Gardner possessed an energetic intellectual curiosity and a love of travel. She was a friend of noted artists and writers of the day, including John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Dennis Miller Bunker, Anders Zorn, Henry James, Okakura Kakuzo and Francis Marion Crawford.
  Gardner created much fodder for the gossip columns of the day with her reputation for stylish tastes and unconventional behavior. The Boston society pages called her by many names, including "Belle," "Donna Isabella," "Isabella of Boston," and "Mrs. Jack". Her surprising appearance at a 1912 concert wearing a white headband emblazoned with "Oh, you Red Sox" was reported at the time to have "almost caused a panic", and remains still in Boston one of the most talked about of her eccentricities.
context_section_description: In 1874, Isabella and Jack Gardner visited the Middle East, Central Europe and Paris. Beginning in the late 1880s, they traveled frequently across America, Europe and Asia to discover foreign cultures and expand their knowledge of art around the world. Jack and Isabella would take more than a dozen trips abroad over the years, keeping them out of the country for a total of ten years.
  The earliest works in the Gardners' collection were accumulated during their trips to Europe especially. In 1891, she started to focus on European fine art after inheriting $1.75 million from her father. One of her first acquisitions was The Concert by Vermeer (c. 1664), purchased at a Paris auction house in 1892. She also collected from other places abroad such as Egypt, Turkey, and the Far East. The Gardners began to collect in earnest in the late 1890s, rapidly building a world-class collection primarily of paintings and statues, but also tapestries, photographs, silver, ceramics and manuscripts, and architectural elements such as doors, stained glass, and mantelpieces.
  In the early years of the 20th century, Isabella traveled with friend and Boston architect Edmund March Wheelwright to collect for the Harvard Lampoon Building, also called "Lampoon Castle", a faux Flemish castle in Harvard Square. Isabella donated many pieces of art to the castle over her years of collecting. The value of this collection is uncertain, due to the secret nature of the Lampoon.
  Nearly seventy works of art in her collection were acquired with the help of dealer Bernard Berenson. Among the collectors with whom she competed was Edward Perry Warren, who supplied a number of works to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Gardner collection includes works by some of Europe's most important artists, such as Botticelli's Madonna and Child with an Angel, Titian's Europa, Raphael's The Colonna Altarpiece, and Diego Velázquez. She purchased some of her collection on her own, but often asked for male colleagues, such as her business partner, to purchase on her behalf as it was uncommon for women to participate in art collecting.
  Isabella Stewart Gardner's favorite foreign destination was Venice, Italy. The Gardners regularly stayed at the Palazzo Barbaro, a major artistic center for a circle of American and English expatriates in Venice, and visited Venice's artistic treasures with amateur artist and former Bostonian Ralph Curtis. While in Venice, Gardner bought art and antiques, attended the opera and dined with expatriate artists and writers.
caption: Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice (1894), by Anders Zorn (Gardner Museum)
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