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of the most original spirits in the history of art. No other draftsman in the host of clever illustrators and caricaturists adorning his time had anything like his richness of individuality. That fecundity at which I have glanced in citing Beraldi's figure of eight thousand designs is significant of the type of creative artist that Gavarni was. He operated like a force of nature, spontaneously, abundantly, and with a sort of sublime certainty. His touch has about it a wonderful ease and precision. Consider too how free he is from surplusage, with what perfect balance and economy he puts his compositions together. I would not press this matter of his felicity in design too far. He is in no wise Raphaelesque as a weaver of linear patterns. On the other hand, nothing could be more discreet or more pointedly right than his placing of a figure. There he has that virtue for which Matthew Arnold had such appreciation in his word "inevitability." He realizes a scene, a group, or an isolated figure, always in what seem to be both the terms of life and the terms of pictorial unity.

E led a long, successful, and, in the main, unadventurous life. One rather surprising episode arrests his biographers. Once, he went to London, to spend a few weeks and remained there for several years. He had introductions to smooth his way into the presence of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, but for some occult reason he scamped his courtly opportunities and devoted himself to observation of the ordinary walks of life. He had his misanthropic moods, and latterly the philosopher in him knew some sad moments. The death of a son bore heavily upon his spirit and he suffered a material vexation which sorely exasperated him. Gavarni was an impassioned lover of flowers and trees, and he was happy in cultivating his Auteuil garden. But the Haussmannization of Paris spoiled all that, a new railway cutting right into his domain. Still, there was the success of which I have spoken.

It was piled up steadily. Gavarni soon became in Paris something like an institution. He did not struggle for his renown. There is a pretty story of a colloquy between him and M. Cavé, Director of Fine Arts, about the cross of the Legion of Honor. The official wondered if he cared to have it and on Gavarni's making an affirmative reply offered him pen and paper with which to make a request for the honor. If the cross depended on his asking for it, said Gavarni, he would never receive it. Later, in 1852, Comte de Nieuwerkerke saw to it that he got the decoration without pleading. He had lacked nothing of appreciation and recognition when he closed his eyes in 1866, and he could close them with the resignation of an artist who had enjoyed life and left behind him a body of work calculated, in the nature of things, to keep his name alive. The pictures of a painter are comparatively limited in number and remain more or less stationary. The prints of a lithographer are prodigiously multiplied. and carry his art everywhere. The traits of Gavarni are like those of an author, susceptible of the widest circulation. His repute is, I should say, fairly universal

now.

Is it matched by as extensive an influence? Hardly. Pictorial satire since his day has rarely developed that vein of gayety which was peculiarly characteristic of him. The other day with this subject in my mind I looked through the "Feu Pierrot" of that jocund humorist, Willette, who should have recaptured something of Gavarni's verve if any modern Frenchman could have done so. But the book left a rather dubious taste in my mouth. After the high-bred art of Gavarni the fun of Montmartre seemed a little coarse, the levities of the Chat Noir a little vulgar. It was breeding, yes, that set Gavarni upon such an eminence; it was his distinction and his genius. Also it was something that the modern draftsman strangely neglects, perhaps because he thinks that it lies outside his pailiwick. It was the sense of beauty. It was his possession of that, I think, that made Gavarni what he was, not only a great satirist but a great artist.

A calendar of current art exhibitions will be found on page 19.

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VOL. LXXVII

MARCH, 1925

NO. 3

Mrs. Gardner and Her Masterpiece

THE GIFT OF FENWAY COURT TO THE PUBLIC

BY ELIZABETH WARD PERKINS

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

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ROVINCIALISM a brilliant, thoroughly social life, in order lives in cities as com- to train herself to find in persons, objects, placently as in villages; and pictures the materials for her major however large the com- interest. Only after she had lived in Bosmunity, in every one ton for some time, and many years before there are only a few she demonstrated to Americans the funcworld-minded citizens tion of a museum as a place where works whose individual point of art enhance each other in a due relaof view leavens the dulness of the crowd. tion, rather than a storage for isolated exBoston was fortunate in being kept alert hibits, her house at 152 Beacon Street held for many years by a woman of the worlds the great Titian, her first important purof art, letters, and society. Although Mrs. chase. It was not the first house the Gardner travelled widely after her mar- Gardners occupied in Boston. From 1862 riage, her continuity of living was in Bos- to 1876 they lived at 150 Beacon. At ton with her husband's many relations that time they bought the house next door, and the friends whom she continued to at- threw the two houses together, and lived tract to the end of her long life. there in winter until Fenway Court was completed. In 1884 John Lowell Gardner inherited the fine old family place, Green Hill, in Brookline, after his father's death. The important years of Mrs. Gardner's life as a collector of art were spent in the three dwellings, so different in character and only a few miles apartBeacon Street, Green Hill, and Fenway Court, now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Born in the city of New York on the 14th of April, 1839, Isabella Stewart was plain of face and beautiful of person. She spent her girlhood in her native town, went to school in Paris, and at the age of twenty-one married John Lowell Gardner, of Boston, the brother of a school friend with whom she went to stay after the two girls had returned from Europe. Her dominant personality and particular choice of self-expression made her a national as well as a local figure. Her friendships were international, her ambassadors everywhere, but the focus was in Boston. No other city could have given her a frame so becomingly in contrast, yet duly subordinated to her insistence on the adventure of being herself.

It was twenty years or more after her marriage that Mrs. Gardner interrupted

The greater public knew of Fenway Court as "Mrs. Jack Gardner's Italian Palace." In the Beacon Street house were found the same elements out of which Fenway Court materialized later. A tall, fragrant Mimosa-tree, its hanging blossoms ready for bees, was an unusual thing to find growing in a house on Beacon Street, a house crammed with pictures and works of art that seemed bursting

Copyrighted in 1925 in United States, Canada, and Great Britain by Charles Scribner's Sons. Printed in
New York. All rights reserved.

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time. But here the very air was weighted with meaning. On the threshold one was aware of the masters in their original expression, according to the fashion of all time. Centuries and the races of man jostled one another in that Beacon Street drawing-room, as do the nations in our republic. The effect was startling yet harmonious, the negative was left out and incongruities were bound together by the note of character and interest common to all.

Mrs. Gardner herself liked to surprise and to excite to further questioning. Alert, behind her graciousness of manner

The following anecdote is typical of Mrs. Gardner in these early surroundings: On a cold New England winter day she sat under the great Mimosa-tree, among a confusion of beautiful objects in the overfull Beacon Street house, and listened to William Haseltine, an American painter who lived in Rome, never interrupting, but hearing all he had to tell to the end.

Mr. Haseltine had been stimulated by his environment to vivid recollection of a walking trip in an obscure part of Spain. At rest in a mountain village, he had seen in a dim old church a glint of gold and gray aloft. An investigation which in

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