SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE 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 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 apart Beacon 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 |