Isabella Stewart Gardner

Portrait of Isabella   Stewart Gardner

Isabella Stewart Gardner (14 April 1840, New York City, USA17 July 1924, Boston, USA) was a leading American art collector, philanthropist, and an eclectic patron of the arts who founded the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, USA, in 1903, and visited China, Southeast Asia and Cambodia as early as 1883.

Known as Belle” in her youth, and later Mrs. Jack” in reference to her late husband John Lowell Jack’ Gardner, she opened Fenway Court as a private museum when she was 63, she wrote in a letter to a friend at the end of her life: 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…So I determined to make it my life’s work if I could.” (Dykstra, Natalie, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, HarperCollins, 2024, p 3. Kindle Edition.) 

An avid traveler since her young age, with a particular fondness for Venice, Italy, Isabella extensively traveled the world with her husband and with her maid, Mary O’Callaghan. In the Vatichino gallery of the museum — the little Vatican’, as she playfully named it — is kept her Travel Diary to China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Singapore, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Myanmar, Egypt and Italy (Vol IV, 1883 – 1884), in which she wrote down meticulous records of her acquisitions. 

She visited Angkor in November 1883, part of a fast-paced and thorough worldwide trip that has started in Japan and took her, from August 1883 to February 1884, to Shanghai, Tianjin, Chefoo (Yantai), Peking (Beijing), Shanghai again, then Hong Kong, Canton (Guangzhou), Macao, Saigon, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, Java, Surabaya, Madiun, Surakarta, Yogyakarta, Borobudur, Semarang, Batavia (Jakarta), Singapore, Malacca (Melaka), Penang, Burma, Moumain (Mawlamyine), Prome (Pyay), Rangoon (Yangon). She continued through India, Calcutta (Kolkata), Darjeeling, Bombay (Mumbai), Hyderabad, Madras (Chennai), Madurai, Allahabad, Benares (Varanasi), Lucknow, Agra, Delhi, Lahore, Simla (Shimla), Jaipur, Mount Abu, and Ahmedabad. (N. Dykstra, op. cit., p 117 – 8).

She was probably the first American woman to visit the ruins of Angkor, and one of the first women to do so, if we consider that Anna Leonowens actually traveled to the Angkorean site from Bangkok in 1866 – 7.

Also in the collection is the letter (on eleven postcards of Angkor Wat) Mary Hoyt Williams Crozier (27 Apr 1864, Stonington, CT, USA — 2 Aug 1955, Washington, DC, USA) sent to Isabella from Siem Reap on Jan. 2, 1922 (ARC 001090). [Mary Crozier’s Travel journal from Washington, D.C. to Japan and China via San Francisco, 1920 – 1922 is kept at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WYUSA].

Mary crozier isabella postcard 1
Mary crozier postcard to isabella gardner 2jan1922
1922 Angkor postcards sent to Isabella by Mary Crozier (The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston)

With her dazzling personality, she attracted the attention of renowned artists and writers of her time, among them John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Henry James, Okakura Kakuzo and Francis Marion Crawford. Inheriting a vast fortune in 1891, she started to collect artworks, with The Concert by Vermeer, purchased in Paris in 1892, being the first major piece and stolen from the musuem, along with major works by Degas and Manet, during the infamous 18 March 1990 heist. The couple’s collection included tapestries, photographs, silver, ceramics and manuscripts, and architectural elements from Egypt, Turkey, Russia and the Far East.

Isabella stewart gardner sargent
Isabella’s portrait by John Singer Sargent in 1888 (MET Collection).
Isabella Stewart Gardner 1906
Photo portrait, 1906.

According to her latest biographers [Silver, Nathaniel, Seave Greenwald, Diana: Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life. Princeton University Press, 2022. ISBN 978 – 0691 – 973845], she sometimes reveled in the exoticism” of non-Western practices — like riding an elephant, as she did in Cambodia to tour the temples of the Angkor Wat complex. And the photographs she chose for her albums sometimes feature ethnographic images of the people who lived in the places she visited, or positioned local residents as picturesque props in a broader composition. But in general, her tone is one of awe rather than of dismissal of these people and cultures — unlike the attitude of some American and European travelers of her wealth and class.” (pp 84 – 5). 

Isabella gardner petlion boston
Dazzling: Mrs Jack’ and her pet lion in The Boston Sunday Post, 31 Jan. 1897.

Recent publications about Isabella Stewart Gardner

Natalie Dykstra, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Mariner Books, 2024, 512 p, ISBN 9781328515759.