Diversions: The Ten Portraits of Isabella Stewart Gardner

Isabella Stewart Gardner

Isabella Stewart Gardner was a dedicated and energetic patroness of the arts. In 1917 she explained her motivation for collecting: "Years ago I decided that the greatest need in our Country was Art. We were a very young country and had very few opportunities of seeing beautiful things, works of art. So I determined to make it my life's work if I could." Throughout the years she collected art - and artists - and encouraged and supported them. Her collection is shown at the beautiful Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

She also commissioned ten portraits of herself from some of the finest artists of her age. Here are images of seven of them:

John Singer Sargent's oil portrait from 1888. She was a high-energy, restless sitter and would continually look out the window to see what was happening on the river outside their home at 152 Beacon Street in Boston. Sargent grew frustrated and after eight unsuccessful attempts was willing to give the entire enterprise up but she was reported to have insisted “as nine was Dante’s mystic number, they must make the ninth try a success," and it was. She loved the painting and thought it the best portrait John ever did, even tried to get Sargent to admit as much. Her husband, on the other hand, had an opinion altogether different and expressed it in a letter to his wife: "It looks like hell, but looks like you."

In spite of of their rocky start, John Sargent and Isabella became fast friends, and towards the end of her life, it was he who asked if she would sit for him. She had suffered a debilitating stroke in December 1919, which had left her right side paralyzed. As Sargent depicts her, pale and fragile, sitting on a day-bed with cushions propped around her, she might seem a diminished figure, but swathed in translucent white cloths and spiritually disembodied, she has the shrouded mystery of a priestess or seer, radiating a haunting, other-worldly presence. It seems to have appealed to her taste for the dramatic and exotic. She said that the new painting was keeping 'everyone's tongue busy wagging' and confessing that "even I think it is exquisite." The portrait might be seen as Sargent's pictorial valediction to a remarkable collector, patron and friend. Mrs. Gardner died less than two years after it was painted. Sargent was named in her will as one of her pallbearers, but he was unable to attend the funeral.

The sense of vitality and artistic flair that she found in Venice - and by which she lived her life - is eloquently captured in Anders Zorn's "Mrs. Gardner in Venice." Painted in 1896 at the Palazzo Barbaro, the portrait captures the moment when Isabella Stewart Gardner, watching fireworks from a balcony, stood in the doorway, arms outstretched and invited her guests to join her to watch the display.