Remarkable, Unconventional Isabella

Isabella Stewart Gardner

Isabella Stewart Gardner was born in New York City on April 14, 1840 into wealth and privilege. She learned early on that an elevated station in life couldn't stop bad things from happening. Her baby Jackie died of pneumonia in 1864 when less than one year old.

Isabella was inconsolable for nearly two years. Upon her phycisian's advice, her husband, Jack took her to Europe. She found solace in travel and returned to America a healthy, happy woman. By this time, Isabella was known as Mrs. Jack. She had abandoned hope of motherhood, and had also abandoned conventions imposed on women of her class.

Newspapers carried sketches of her strolling with lions borrowed from the zoo. She drove horses and cars at breakneck speed. She smoked cigarettes. She went to boxing matches. She had a pair of large diamonds mounted on gold springs and wore them like antennae in her hair. Once, to attract notice to a concert by an unknown musician she favored, she stood at the door of the concert hall handing out programs. A passionate athlete and sports fan, she was seen at the symphony wearing a hatband inscribed ''Oh You Red Sox.'' A dahlia was named for her, as was a peak in the Isabella mountain range in Washington.

With her money she could have been the poster girl for the idle rich. Instead, she found her passion: collecting art. In 1917, she wrote to a friend:

"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."

In the late 1890s, Isabella and Jack rapidly built a world-class collection of paintings and statues, tapestries, photographs, silver, ceramics and manuscripts, and architectural elements such as doors, stained glass, and mantelpieces.

After Jack's death in 1898, she commissioned the construction of Fenway Court, a personal museum based on a Venetian palazzo, to house their vast collection. Involving herself in every detail of the design and installations, she personally supervised the placement of every last piece, and then took up residence in an apartment on the fourth floor.

When she opened her home to the public on New Year's Day in 1903, guests listened to the music of Bach, Mozart, and Schumann, gazed in wonder at the courtyard full of flowers, and viewed one of the nation's finest collections of art. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum had been born.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

There was also a time when she offered the use of the third floor to John Singer Sargent as a studio. He painted several portraits at that location including the one of Mrs. Fenway and her daughter.

Isabella Inviting Guests to See Venetian Fireworks
gifted to her by Anders Zorn, 1894

In old age she practiced a miserly frugality that astounded her cold, hungry houseguests; she explained she was protecting the funds she intended to leave for the maintenance of her museum. Isabella died at Fenway Court on June 17, 1924 but she remains an ever-present force within its walls.

She ordered that all the art work must remain exactly as she arranged it. If it is moved or changed in any way, the entire collection must be sold. The museum appears much the same today as it did the day it opened.

The only changes are now the empty frames that once held a Vermeer, a Manet, three Rembrandt and five Degas works which were stolen in 1990. Two thieves dressed as police officers overpowered the guards and stole 13 works of art valued at around 300 million dollars. Despite a 5 million dollar reward, the art work has yet to be recovered, and remains the largest art heist in modern history. Is Isabella rolling over in her grave, or loving all the attention?!

To see photos of the absolutely beautiful museum that Isabella furnished to house her fabulous painting collection, see the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Facebook page or go to their site at www.gardnermuseum.org.

Information from a variety of sources including:
http://thewritesisters.blogspot.com/2009/04/women-of-wednesday-isabella-stewart.html
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/28/reviews/971228.28middlet.html
http://www.gardnermuseum.org/the_museum/introduction.asp

Introducing Isabella Stewart Gardner

My first meeting with Isabella Stewart Gardner had left me duly Unimpressed. The encounter had been through a portrait of her by John Singer Sargent. She looked like a wannabe Madame X with her fair skin and black dress, and there was something stiff and unappealing in both her pose and expression.

Isabella Stewart Gardner

It seemed like that's just the way John Singer Sargent felt about her, too. "The first time Isabella met Sargent was in England in 1886 by introduction of Henry James. When he finally painted her two years later it was on his first professional trip to America. The painting started in December of 1887 in Boston. For Sargent, it proved difficult. She was a restless sitter, given her high energy, she would continually look out the window to see what was happening on the river outside their home at 152 Beacon Street, 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, who was painted by Mancini, had an opinion altogether different and expressed it in a letter to his wife from New York: 'It looks like hell, but looks like you.'” (Morris Carter, 1925) Isabella was a dedicated - and energetic - patroness of the arts. Upon the creation of her art museum in Boston in 1917, she explained: "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." And so, she collected art - and artists - and encouraged, and supported them. The more I learned about this lady, the more I liked her - and the same happened with Sargent. At the end, it was he who asked her to sit for another portrait. This time it was a lovely watercolor - a tender, caring portrait of this remarkable lady.

Mrs. Gardner in White

"This, Sargent's last portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner, was painted at Fenway Court in September 1922 when she was eighty-two years old. It appears to have been painted on Sargent's initiative. In an undated letter he wrote to Mrs. Gardner from the Copley-Plaza Hotel: 'It is very nice of you to be willing to let me try a water-colour - Will you propose an afternoon of next week?' Mrs. Gardner 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. As a characterization, the water-colour is more intimate but no less iconic than the notorious full-length portrait of Mrs. Gardner, and 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."

 

(Excerpts from "John Singer Sargent, The Later Portraits" by Richard Ormund and Elaine Kilmurray.)

 

Next: Just Who Was Isabella Stewart Gardner?

Why I Draw Plaster Casts

I am a plaster cast drawer these days...and thought that I would like to share Why.

Reason Number One: My Teacher Told Me to Do It
I admire my teacher's beautiful work (www.carlsamson.com) and figure that if he is willing and gracious enough to pass on his knowledge, I will do what he says to do. He received his training from an outstanding group of teachers (Allan Banks, RH Ives Gammell and Richard Lack) who all are from an academic background...and that includes plaster cast drawing. That tradition goes way back to Italy as this video from Angel Academy in Florence, Italy explains:




Reason Number Two: Working from a cast is working from a model that does not move

• Live models vary their positions; it is inevitable. A cast does not. You can depend on seeing the same relationships and shapes. It is an "easier" ballgame in which to play - so to speak.

Reason Number Three: The cast (your model) is always there whenever you have the time

• I now have the cast(s) set up in my art room. Winter is a great time for plaster cast drawing. When I get home from work or wake up early before going to work, it is a simple matter to switch on the spotlight and to start drawing.

Reason Number Four: The cast helps you to see values more clearly

• Since casts are basically ivory, you are not dealing with issues of color. It is easier to concentrate on learning to create form, the bedbug line, distinctions in values and so on.

Reason Number Five: The cast gives you more time to observe art principles for yourself

• When I first started this process, it was in a small class under the close supervision of my teacher. For about eight Saturday mornings, we worked on our cast drawings. He taught us how to use the sight-size method, the Boston School approach to drawing, and other important principles. Now that the class is over. I still have the privilege of getting occasional and valuable input from him, but essentially I have become the day-to-day decision maker and evaluator of my work.
  
  As I spend time with Homer's unchanging head, I have the luxury and time to think about what it is that makes a shape look rounded or how each edge of a shape is saying something about the shape next to it or discerning the planes of a face. Really - this list can go on and on because as I embrace this exercise, I look for more and more truth to discern. I write down my "lessons" and my teacher's critiques on the margin of my drawing. I'm collecting them and saving them as visual and written reminders of this journey.
  

How many of these casts will I do? I've heard that it may be ten, but probably it will be as many as it takes until I understand and can apply the principles that are being taught. I am now on number six and am still learning. As long as I am learning, I am happy.

Is cast drawing the only kind of art I do? No, nope, no way! At the present, I am working on a painted portrait from a live model, regular plein air painting, a still life...plus my Tuesday Morning Meeting sketches. Principles from the cast drawing apply to those other efforts as well. Ah, yes...I also like to read art books which is also valuable - as I'm sure you'd agree!

Homer	The Unknown

How Bunker Went About His Landscape Painting

Dennis Miller Bunker, The Brook at Medfield, 1889
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

When I get out to paint nature, my brain gets an attack of ADHD. The colors, the changing light, how to distinguish the shapes and varieties of foliage overwhelm my ability to interpret what I'm seeing onto canvas. Any method which will break these whirling dervish thoughts down into simple-to-follow steps is welcome.


RH Ives Gammell in his biography, Dennis Miller Bunker, gives some insight into how Bunker went about painting his lovely landscapes:

"He was certainly in full possession of a very sound method of landscape painting when he arrived at Medfield in the early summer of the following year (1889). His way seems to have been to

1. lay in first the larger masses of color on his canvas, a procedure he was able to carry out with great rapidity and accuracy.
   
   

2. In so doing he established once and for all the general tonality of his picture, pitching it in a key which allowed for sufficient luminosity while avoiding the chalky and insubstantial look which so often mars the work of plein air painters. Bunker's unerring judgment in this matter of key is one of the main factors in the success of his landscapes.
   



3. Once the larger masses were properly established and the canvas covered, he would proceed to work into these areas with broad touches of color. As the pictures progressed these touches naturally became smaller until, in the more finished canvases, the workmanship bore some resemblance to the pointilliste technique of the Frenchmen. But Bunker's feeling for paint quality and fine surface of pigment did not desert him.

Although he necessarily sacrificed some of this surface quality in his unrelenting pursuit of visual truth, several of his landscapes have a beauty of workmanship very unusual in pictures executed out of doors with a similar pictorial purpose."

Dennis Miller Bunker's Warning to His Fiancee

Dennis Miller Bunker

Dennis Miller Bunker was a student of William Merritt Chase (Art Students League and National Academy of Design in New York) and of Jean Louis Gerome in Paris (Ecole des Beaux Arts). Afterwards in Boston, he was in a small sketch group with Joseph DeCamp, spent the summer of 1886 with Abbott Thayer and then the summer of 1888 with John Singer Sargent. He taught at Cowles Art School in Boston in which William Paxton was his best pupil.

On October 2 Bunker married Eleanor Hardy in Boston. The couple then moved to New York. Returning to Boston to celebrate Christmas with the Hardy family, Bunker fell ill. On December 28 he died of heart failure, probably caused by cerebro-spinal meningitis. His legacy was passed on to his students, notably William MacGregor Paxton, who then taught RH Ives Gammell, who in turn taught a number of very fine, current painters.

As I read Gammell's biography of Bunker, I was interested in how he developed as an artist and how he lived, and also in some of the attitudes that artists of that time held. You might be surprised - and perhaps unpleasantly - because they are certainly not reflected in most attitudes these days.


Do You Realize What You're Really Getting Into?

Here is an excerpt from a letter to Eleanor with a dire warning of what it would be like to be the wife of an artist:

"Do you know what it is to live with a painter? Of course you don't! Do you see me getting up at two in the morning with a candle to look at my picture or rising at six to play on the piano, as I did yesterday, in a dressing gown, with my eyes half open or sitting up all night to fight over something that will seem to you of no importance? Will you care for the species of chimpanzee that we suspect of great talent? Will you feel the pang and the weeks of distress that come when you paint a poor thing? Will you be able to stand the conceit and absurd and idiotic talk when we've done a good morsel of painting? ...Are you to see me rude to all sorts of swagger people and afraid of the wash-woman?"

"You must try and realize how dull and monotonous an artist's life is. There is absolutely nothing but work, work, work. And there is nothing in the work of an artist that shows his personality.

You are marrying a man whose highest ambition is to conceal his identity, to remain above his work and apart from it, not to appear in it in any way - to be as cold and calm as a machine. Oh! if I only could, I might some day learn to paint! What I am trying to tell you is not to nourish any ideas of an artist people whom you see may expound to you. Don't think, as they do, that the charm of an artist's work must be found also in his own personality. It is always apart, or should be, should have nothing to do with it, and that is what makes it such an infernal trade. Never to play on one's own twopenny flute but to keep the big end in view always; to remain patient and cold and quiet and work like a dog from morning 'til night; there is no other way of arriving even at talent, unless one is cut out of larger stuff than I am.

I wish I could sink myself completely out of sight, so that when people looked at my things they would never think how they were made, never think that they were clever, or never think, above all, that they were personal. Great painting should have no stamp of its maker. I dream of doing a thing that is absolutely stupid - I mean what I say - absolutely stupid in style and manner of work but also in subject, and then have it of a truth so gigantic and bare and big that no one will ever forget it. But God knows how such a task is ever to be accomplished!

Certainly not by being smart for a few years and glittering in the sun and pleasing the bourgeois. It is so easy to be smart in Art, so easy to catch this and that quality of the time or the taste, the frightful smug taste of the public, so easy to do all manner of tricks of sentiment, of lies that people love and hug and live with and praise! Oh! how differently I can think of it! It costs more courage, more true courage, to do a thing with a true sentiment and in a true impression than any form of danger we can face, I think. Never to palliate a line or a tone; to know the precious value of what is human and beastly in us as well as what is great and noble..."

from RH Ives Gammell's biography of Dennis Miller Bunker

Tomorrow I will post some of his paintings and ask the question: Do you think that it is possible to hide your identity as you create a painting?

Reminding Myself: About the Unity of Effect

In the Studio
William MacGregor Paxton

Often people assume that realistic or classical painting is merely copying subject matter. They do not realize that good painting is very much like a good game of chess. There are strategies according to which a painter will create his work. To emphasize his vision of the subject, the artist will create particular types of edges, make alterations in the composition, and alter values and colors. As he pays careful attention to these things, he must also pay parallel attention to the Unity of Effect. RH Ives Gammell, an excellent artist and legendary teacher in Boston, wrote on the Effect in his biography, Dennis Miller Bunker:

On Unity of Effect
"People untrained in the art of painting often believe that finish is attained by simply adding detail to detail and consequently they dismiss it as a mere by-product of industry and patience. Unfortunately this view does not correspond with the truth.

For an essential characteristic of all fine painting is unity of effect, and this unity is destroyed by any detail stated in a false relation to the other component parts of the picture. This is particularly true of the type of painting we are here discussing, the purpose of which is to recreate on canvas the impression made on the painter's eye by the landscape before him.

To achieve this end, each detail must be set down with the degree of definition and coloration which it holds for the eye when the focus of vision is adjusted so as to include the entire scene depicted. Piecemeal notation of individual detail immediately destroys the requisite unity of impression and turns the canvas into a compilation of separately observed visual facts. This invariably results in a hard, dry look, destroying all breadth of effect and offensive even to those who are quite unaware of its technical cause.

It is, in fact, one of the most serious defects which a painting can have and perhaps the most difficult defect for an earnest painter to avoid. The ability to carry a picture to a high degree of finish without losing its unity of impression is the mark of a master and requires artistry of the highest order. It is the central problem of the type of painting which takes for its main theme the interpretation of the beauty of the visible world."

from RH Ives Gammell's book, Dennis Miller Bunker, pp. 65, 66

Living through Winter in Paris, 1880s

Boulevard Saint Martin in Winter, Paris 1913

What was it like to live through a winter in Paris in the late 1800's? For many students both at Julian's and the ateliers, it was far from glamorous, but they were willing to endure much for their art. Here is Cecilia Beaux' description of her experience:

"Our pension was in the quarter of the Pont de l'Ama, but not near to the river and its beauty. All that a skimping French pension could mean in mid-winter was ours. Mdlle. de Villeneuve, our keeper, bore her considerable years, which had borne much skimping, too, under a brown wig and a long nose. She carried Fi-Fi, a tiny, old dog with rattling teeth and a cracked bark, constantly under her arm. She had bony fingers, and for the first time I heard the rattle also of keys.

Friends were expecting us and there were others there who were to become friends. Our room was au premier, and was furnished in Bon-Marche imitations of Louis XV, and of course second-hand at that. We were to spend a few months in a type of French house which at that time Americans, who wished to appear respectable, and even stylish, used to frequent. Our room looked into a side street. We did not know then that we should have been thankful that in this quarter it was not a court that our windows commanded, and although the street was in itself monotonous, we soon found that on all stories our opposite neighbors were not.

Probably our waterproofs and cotton gloves had already instructed our landlady in the type of art students we represented, and she guessed that we were too serieuse even to recognize the character of the tenants en face. They were much on the balconies and one of them used to come out and water her flowers in a red flannel petticoat.

Our room was, of course, unheated, though it had a pretty chimney-piece and a clock, and what heat the previous summer had left behind had died long since between the closed windows and door. I was not pampered, and of course steam heat was unknown to me at home, but I had never known the damp, penetrating chill of never-heated houses in winter. Of course, a wood fire was impossible for us, but they wheeled us in a Schoubersky, a black charcoal stove, which could travel from room to room and never demand a chimney. Our chimney was a very retiring one, but with the Schoubersky approximately near it, we might avoid suffocation.

Until May, we never saw the sun, but I had started immediately at the Julien Cours in the rue de Berry, and my good circulation did the rest, for a polite little French woman in the adjoining room used to borrow our Schoubersky in the morning and forget to return it.

We were far from touching the high elegance that existed near us. We wore shabby clothes, demodee [outmoded], and prim, and until spring came and we did a little shopping, we were invisible in the street. Our complexions always proved that we were English, our ulsters bore out this fact, and the cochers [coachmen] shouted, "Anglaise [English]!" when they wanted to be rude.

In February and March, the snow had fallen sparsely and melted. It never lay upon the pavements of Paris, and I learned what it was to leave a chill house for the bitter chill of outdoors. Not once did we see the sun, and perhaps this had something to do with another moment of ecstasy.

One morning in early April, we met, and saw, the first of Spring in Paris. All of youth, hope, and joy seemed to be in those shafts of sunshine, pouring through virgin leaf and violet shadow, and in the voices that called this and that from cleverly manipulated pushcarts heaped with flowers, vegetables, fruit, whose fresh moisture the sun touched with rainbow hues.

Every French heart bounded with the hour's happiness, and I knew that my heart was French, too. We saw the French sky for the first time; a Heaven not too high to be mixed with Earth's quality. Tender blue and white lifting large forms over, but in perfect unison with wall and verdure and the sumptuous greys of Paris."

from Background with Figures by Cecilia Beaux