Art Review: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston

Last week, after I visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see its 150th anniversary Monet exhibition, I walked over to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I adore the Gardner. It’s unique. Mrs. Gardner was a visionary collector, buying supreme works by Vermeer and Titian, but she was also an artist. Her work of art was her house, or palace, evoking a Venetian palace on the Grand Canal and decorated to the nines to reflect her eclectic, eccentric, and indisputably good taste. Money and good taste are two roads that rarely converge, so when they do, the result is a national monument.

I misled you and myself last week. I said I hadn’t been to Boston in years. I’d forgotten, for good cause, a stop at the Gardner last year on the way to the airport. I saw Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent, an exhibition of preparatory drawings Sargent made while he worked on murals for the Museum of Fine Arts. Sargent hired McKeller, an African-American bellhop at his Boston hotel, as a model for the murals, still at the MFA today. He later gave a portfolio of the drawings he made using McKeller to Mrs. Gardner, and the drawings lay undisturbed at the museum for a hundred years until the Gardner did Boston’s Apollo.

About the Author

Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

Last week, after I visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see its 150th anniversary Monet exhibition, I walked over to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I adore the Gardner. It’s unique. Mrs. Gardner was a visionary collector, buying supreme works by Vermeer and Titian, but she was also an artist. Her work of art was her house, or palace, evoking a Venetian palace on the Grand Canal and decorated to the nines to reflect her eclectic, eccentric, and indisputably good taste. Money and good taste are two roads that rarely converge, so when they do, the result is a national monument.

I misled you and myself last week. I said I hadn’t been to Boston in years. I’d forgotten, for good cause, a stop at the Gardner last year on the way to the airport. I saw Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent, an exhibition of preparatory drawings Sargent made while he worked on murals for the Museum of Fine Arts. Sargent hired McKeller, an African-American bellhop at his Boston hotel, as a model for the murals, still at the MFA today. He later gave a portfolio of the drawings he made using McKeller to Mrs. Gardner, and the drawings lay undisturbed at the museum for a hundred years until the Gardner did Boston’s Apollo.