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The heiress and the art critic

EDITORIAL | Jeremy D. Goodwin

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 22, 2012|By Jeremy D. Goodwin

Bernard Berenson, right, eagerly helped Isabella Stewart Gardner, left,…

ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER knew what she liked — right down to the flowers. She was so fond of “Christ Carrying the Cross,’’ a painting of disputed authorship by a follower of Giovanni Bellini, that she was known to place a vase of fresh violets before it — a practice maintained, down through the decades, by museum staff.

First she had heard about efforts by the nascent Museum of Fine Arts to buy the painting, and repeatedly urged her friend and adviser Bernard Berenson to hunt it down for her instead. “I adore it. Yet, somehow it is not the kind of thing I think of for you,’’ he wrote her in September 1896. She was undeterred: “Do bear my purse in mind and beat down the people who have what I want; for I must have the pictures! There’s logic for you.’’ Berenson arranged the sale. It eventually found a home in the third floor Titian Room of Gardner’s namesake museum.

The pas de deux they danced — this unconventional American heiress and her unlikely acquaintance, a self-made art expert 25 years her junior of humble origin and high ambition — co-mingled friendship, patronage, and commerce. It resulted in the purchase of the foundational masterpieces of her museum, and thus her legacy. In the process she spent much of her fortune, sometimes paying more than the market may have truly required, but delighting in the results. He became a deity among scholars, penning the definitive texts on Italian Renaissance painting while enriching himself as he messily intertwined his roles as historian and busy actor in the art market.

They only met in person perhaps a dozen times; the relationship lives in their letters, which were collected in a 1987 book edited by former Gardner Museum director Rollin Hadley. Berenson was full of flattery and deference while firmly encouraging purchase after purchase; Gardner was eager to show her savvy and agree with his pronouncements, but possessed a clear idea of what she wanted.

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HEIRESS TO a New York shipping fortune and educated in France, she married Boston Brahmin Jack Gardner at age 19, but her outspoken nature made her no great match with reserved, Victorian-era Boston high society. It was in her 50s that she truly began making her mark, becoming one of the first major American collectors of European painting, enthusiastically remaking herself in the model of enlightened female art patrons of the Renaissance. Her taste was iconoclastic: She was unafraid of paintings treating mythological subjects, nudes, and religious iconography, when her more conservative peers focused on Dutch portraiture.