Great collectors II - Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840 - 1924)

Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840 - 1924)

Isabella Stewart Gardner fue una de las coleccionistas más activas de la época cuando empezó a comprar arte al heredar la fortuna de su padre. De carácter extravagante, fue el centro de atención mediático del Boston de finales de siglo XIX. Mostró mucho interés por el arte de artistas antiguos, pero también por el de sus coetáneos, manteniendo relaciones de íntima amistad con artistas como John Singer Sargent y Anders Zorn, entre muchos otros.

Su vanidad exigía todo el protagonismo. Debía tener lo mejor. Si sus deseos eran contrariados, se estimulaba su apetito (...). En sus relaciones personales no encontraba impedimentos ni se detenía ante rechazos o derrotas. Y lo mismo ocurrió cuando empezó a coleccionar arte. Aline B. Saarinen.

Not only did she become a great collector of old art, she also set an important precedent: she decorated her home with original antique elements that she bought on her travels around the world. Later on, other collectors would follow her example, like William Randolph Hearst, who took it to lengths close to plunder. Crazy as it was, the project worked, and she managed to turn her home, Fenway Court, into Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (ISG) (Massachusetts, United States). Here we have another collector who on her death decided to share her fortune and her excellent art collection with her country, the United States.

Años atrás decidí que lo que más falta le hacía a nuestro país era el arte. Éramos una nación muy joven y teníamos pocas oportunidades de contemplar cosas bonitas, obras de arte...así que decidí convertirlo en mi objetivo de vida. Isabella Stewart Gardner (1917).

Isabella was given an education geared towards the arts and letters that included Italian and French, both vital to her career as a collector. When she was sixteen her family moved to Paris so she could finish her studies, and she took the chance to travel to Italy, where she began to discover what would later become her greatest passion: art. At eighteen she returned to New York, her home city. From there she travelled to Boston to visit Julia Gardner, a well-born classmate she had become good friends with, and the sister of John Lowell "Jack" Gardner, whom she would marry two years later. The couple had a son who died shortly before his second birthday. A year later Isabella had a miscarriage and was told she would not be able to have children again. Julia's death soon afterwards added to the list of misfortunes that piled up in just a few years. Isabella couldn't bear it and fell into a depression whose only remedy was travel.

Jack took Isabella travelling around Europe. While they were based in Paris over the following year, they travelled through Russia and Scandinavia, and managed to make Isabella wipe the slate clean, turning her into the outgoing woman she would be remembered as. She built a reputation as an adventurer, travelling through many countries in Africa, Asia and Europe, where she picked up furniture, textiles, ceramics, sculptures and drawings, among other objects.

When she inherited her father's fortune in 1891 she began buying artworks quite frequently, and when her husband died in 1898, Isabella decided to buy some land so she could make their shared dream come true and build a museum to house her collection.

The collection of the ISG Museum in Boston

A partir de 1892, Isabella viajó con bastante asiduidad a Europa, con el objetivo de comprar obras de arte. Una de las primeras piezas que compró fue El concierto de Vermeer, una de las joyas de la colección de no ser por el trágico robo que tuvo lugar en 1990, en el cual se sustrajeron esta y otras 12 piezas del museo.

Isabella spent a lot of time in Venice, her base of operations in Europe. She always knew how to surround herself with top-level advisers and experts such as Bernard Berenson, who advised her for many years and got her some of the most interesting artworks in the collection. The relationship between Isabella and Bernard paid off for both of them; Berenson offered her the best artworks he came across, well aware of how much his opinion mattered to the collector, and she got hold of first-rate artworks ahead of other collectors. Despite such an idyllic relationship, Isabella did not always follow Berenson's advice to the letter, and at times there were disagreements because of her strict taste.

One of the finest pieces Berenson secured for Isabella was El rapto de Europa, which Titian painted for Philip II between 1560 and 1562. The one in the Prado Museum is a copy by Rubens. Bernard Berenson also supplied other great artworks (as many as 70) to Isabella and her husband, such as Rembrandt's Autorretrato a los 23 años and major works by Italian Renaissance artists like Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Giotto and Simone Martini. Even so, Jack, Isabella's husband, had his doubts about Berenson's honesty, since on one occasion he had got an attribution wrong and on others the prices seemed slightly inflated.

Berenson was not Isabella's only adviser. The American painter Joseph Lindon Smith got her Piero della Francesca's Hércules, and Richard Norton, the son of a Harvard University professor who was a friend of Isabella's, supplied her with classical sculptures bought in Rome.

Despite the sad theft of March 1990, in which Vermeer's El concierto, Rembrandt's Tempestad en el mar de Galilea, a landscape by Govert Flinck and ten other pieces disappeared, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston holds a collection of immeasurable quality in a very intimate setting that has undergone the fewest possible changes since it was conceived a century ago. It is fascinating to see how the collector was able to design her home, Fenway Court, out of structural and decorative elements brought from all over the world, and how harmonious the result turned out to be.