7

Isabella Stewart Gardner, Bernard Berenson and the Creation of her Museum

Isabella Stewart Gardner was one of a breed of newly-rich American collectors who benefited from the economic boom the United States enjoyed in the late nineteenth century. The population had risen greatly, with mass immigration from Europe, but industrial production had increased still faster. By 1900 the country, which possessed half of the world’s resources of iron ore and coal, was producing double the amount of iron and steel manufactured in Britain. Americans, like their counterparts in Britain who had created an Industrial Revolution a century earlier, produced a host of new inventions including Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, Thomas Edison’s electric light and phonograph, Elisha Otis’ elevator and C. Latham Sholes’ typewriter. Even more important was the erection, at first in New York and Chicago, and subsequently all over the continent, of tall buildings, encased within a steel frame, which earned the nickname ‘skyscrapers’. This astonishing outpouring of creative energy linked to industrial development is often called the Second Industrial Revolution.

One manifestation of America’s new-found economic strength was the appearance of giant corporations, such as U. S. Steel, General Electric and Standard Oil. The industrialists who ran these companies, men such as the oil magnate John D. Rockerfeller and the financier John Pierpont Morgan, became some of the richest men in the world. Morgan, like many of these industrialists, had begun his career making railways, which had spread across the whole continent following the Civil War, allowing the much more efficient transportation of manufactured goods and agricultural produce. These railroad pioneers were often referred to as ‘robber barons’ on account of their ruthless pursuit of success. Having made their fortunes, they wanted to invest their wealth in art; many of them proceeded to create museums to house their collections.

J. P. Morgan had set up U. S. Steel in 1901, the first billion-dollar company in the world, buying Carnegie Steel, the creation of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, for $480 million on the way. Morgan a great art collector and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (opened to the public in 1924) is his legacy (Morgan also bequeathed over 4,000 works of art to the Metropolitan Museum in New York). Other railroad barons followed suit. The Walters Museum in Baltimore (opened in 1934), the Huntington Art Museum in Los Angeles (opened in 1928), and the delightful Frick Museum in New York (opened in 1935) all house the collections of these ‘robber barons’.

Railways were not the only way to amass a fortune. The retailer Benjamin Altman and the sugar magnate Henry Osborne Havemeyer were both major benefactors of the Metropolitan Museum. Havemeyer’s lawyer John G. Johnson left his collection of Old Masters to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The retailer Samuel Kress, the banker and industrialist Andrew Mellon and the wealthy businessman Peter Widener were instrumental in founding the National Gallery in Washington in 1937, to which they bequeathed their collections.

The most spectacular artistic coup was made by Mellon, then Secretary to the Treasury, who made a secret purchase in 1930–1, for $7 million, from the Soviet government of 20 paintings, including Raphael’s Alba Madonna. This is a classic example of the effect a rich nation can have on the art market. Stalin urgently needed foreign currency to finance his first Five-Year Plan, an attempt to promote the industrialization of the Soviet Union by the collectivization of agriculture (this policy was to fail spectacularly with the destruction of the kulaks, or independent farmers, leading to famine and widespread starvation), so he decided to sell some of the masterpieces from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg (then called Leningrad) to the richest buyer, namely the US government.

The ruthlessness these wealthy bankers and industrialists displayed in their pursuit of art was symptomatic of the way that they had made their fortunes. There were, however, other collectors who were less ruthless than these self-made men. Perhaps the most notable was Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was fortunate enough to form the bulk of her collection before the ‘Robber Barons’ began collecting in earnest. The museum she created opened to the public in 1903, long before those endowed by Morgan, Huntington or Frick.

Isabella was the daughter of David Stewart, a New Yorker who had made a recent fortune in Irish linen and mining investments. Her parents sent her to attend finishing school in Paris in 1856–8, where she met Jack Gardner, who came from one of Boston’s grandest and richest families. On returning to New York, the couple began dating and were married in 1860. Morris Carter, first Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, recorded that Boston ladies, up to Isabella’s death, repeated the apocryphal story that ‘Belle Stewart jumped out of a boarding-school window and eloped with Jack Gardner’.

Isabella entered into the intellectual life of Boston and, under the direction of Charles Eliot Norton, professor of the history of art at Harvard University, she developed a love for Dante and began collecting rare books and manuscripts. After the tragic loss of Jackie, her only child, in infancy, Isabella indulged in her passion for travel, making extensive trips with her husband to Europe, the Middle East, India, China and Japan.

A favourite destination was Venice, which the Gardners first visited in 1884, where they were guests of Jack’s relation Daniel Curtis at the Palazzo Barbaro, a fifteenth-century Gothic palace on the Grand Canal which was to serve as the inspiration for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Under the guidance of Daniel’s son Ralph, a talented amateur painter, Isabella embarked on an intense study of Venetian art. She also had the opportunity to meet such luminaries as the writers Robert Browning, John Ruskin and Henry James, and the painters James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase, who were frequent visitors to the palace. The Gardners were very taken with this delectable lifestyle, and were to return regularly to the palace, which they rented for the summer months from the Curtises.

In this delightful setting Jack and Isabella entertained artists, writers and musicians. They commissioned views of Venice by Sargent and the Swedish painter Anders Zorn. Henry James, a frequent visitor, used the palace as the setting for The Aspern Papers and The Wings of the Dove. Isabella made an equally striking impression on the locals. She would later delight in relating a charming anecdote, as Carter recorded in his biography, of a Venetian girl meeting a friend at a railway station and asking why she was there.

‘I’m waiting for the train.’

‘Why are you waiting for the train?’

‘Because Mrs Jack Gardner of Boston is coming on it, and I want to see her.’

‘Why do you want to see her?’

‘Because she is so wicked.’

‘How wicked is she?’

(with awe) ‘More wicked than Cleopatra.’

Returning to Boston must have seemed very tame after the excitements on offer in Venice. Impulsive, witty and reckless, with her almond-shaped eyes, her pale skin and dark hair, Isabella made a pronounced impression, with her provocative dresses designed by Charles Worth and her famous pearls, painted daringly by John Singer Sargent, encircling her waist. Isabella became notorious for her flouting of convention; she rode around town in an open carriage, accompanied by two lion cubs, and was rumoured to receive guests seated in a mimosa tree in her conservatory.

Her every movement was followed with fascination by the press. In 1875 a reporter summed up her appeal:

Mrs Jack Gardner is one of the seven wonders of Boston. She is eccentric, and she has the courage of eccentricity. She is the leader where none dare follow. She is 35, plain and wide-mouthed, but she has the handsomest neck, shoulders and arms in all Boston. She imitates nobody; everything she does is novel and original.

Despite her foibles, Isabella was intensely interested in art and had begun collecting in earnest following the death of her father in 1891, leaving her a fortune estimated to be worth between two and three million dollars. She was later to comment: ‘I had two fortunes – my own and Mr Gardner’s. Mine was for buying pictures, jewels, bric a brac etc. etc. Mr Gardner’s was for household expenses.’ Initially, Isabella and Jack showed little interest in buying major Old Master paintings, but this all changed at the Thoré Burger sale in Paris in December 1892 when they acquired Vermeer’s Concert, an exquisite Dutch interior with two girls, one seated at the keyboard, the other singing, with a man seated between them. This little masterpiece, bought for FF. 29,000 (approximately $6,000), was the most tragic loss from the 1990 burglary at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum.

By this date Isabella had already met Bernard Berenson. Berenson had been born Bernhard Valvrojenski in poverty in Lithuania in 1865, and had been educated by the local rabbi, who had a keen knowledge of literature. Ten years later Bernard (he actually spelt his name Bernhard until the outbreak of the First World War when he changed it to Bernard to show his preference for France over Germany) and his family emigrated to Boston. His father struggled to make a career and became a pedlar, selling his wares from a cart in the villages surrounding Boston. Berenson, however, had set his sights on higher things, and, through extensive reading and hard work, earned himself a place at Boston University, from where he graduated to Harvard.

Harvard, founded in 1636, was the oldest and most esteemed university in the country. The university had entered a golden age under the presidency of Charles Eliot Norton. Norton had travelled widely in Europe, befriending the historian Thomas Carlyle and the art historian John Ruskin, and returned to America convinced that higher education should be designed to prepare undergraduates for economic and political leadership. Under his guidance the curriculum at Harvard included a wide range of subjects, giving students the best chance to discover their own particular bent in life. Undergraduates flocked to study under this enlightened regime. Businessmen were equally impressed and Harvard became the best-endowed university in America, with enormous sums set aside for research. As professor of the history of art and President of the Dante Society, Norton exerted a strong influence on Isabella Stewart Gardner. Berenson attended his lectures but Norton never seems to have liked him, possibly because the professor preferred the Middle Ages whereas his student was passionate about the Italian Renaissance. Certainly, Harvard undergraduates much enjoyed the story that Norton, on being admitted to heaven, recoiled in horror, exclaiming: ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! So Overdone! So garish! So Renaissance!’

Berenson was introduced to Isabella and was highly impressed by this grand Bostonian lady, with her burgeoning collection of paintings, furniture, textiles and stained glass acquired on her extensive travels. Isabella was equally taken with the brilliant young aesthete and helped to pay for his travels to Europe. During his time abroad Berenson acquired his passion for paintings. He met leading scholars of art history on his travels, including Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle and Giovanni Morelli in Rome, both men leading exponents of a new scientific method of analysing what constituted the characteristics of individual artists’ style (see p. 153).

On his return to Boston, Berenson embarked on a dual career as an art historian and dealer. Realizing that he needed to renew his friendship with Isabella if he was to benefit from her desire to collect Old Master paintings, he sent her a copy of his Venetian Painters of the Renaissance when it was published in 1894, a work that established Berenson as the leading authority on Italian Renaissance painting. He enclosed a note with the book stating: ‘I venture to recall myself to your memory apropos of a little book on Venetian painters which I have asked my publishers to send to you. Your kindness to me at a critical moment is something I have never forgotten’. Berenson’s praise for the Venetian masters, their ‘love of objects for their sensuous beauty’, and the way that their paintings ‘seemed intended not for devotion … nor for admiration … but for enjoyment’ was music to the ears of Isabella, who had spent so many summers studying their works in Venice.

The young art historian was to exert a decisive influence on the creation of Isabella’s outstanding collection of Old Master paintings. They embarked on a correspondence which continued for many years, Isabella encouraging Berenson in his desire to become an art connoisseur, while BB, as he signed his letters, whetted Isabella’s appetite with descriptions of all the great paintings he encountered on his travels. The correspondence is very revealing of the two conflicting strands in Berenson’s character: the high-minded aesthete, unsurpassed in his knowledge of Renaissance painting, and the picture dealer, looking to make the maximum profit on any sale. It is clear from Berenson’s correspondence that he was playing the role of a canny picture dealer from the moment he began offering his advice.

One of the reasons that Berenson was such a good salesman was his brilliant way with words. He could empathize with Isabella’s love for Venice by writing: ‘I know no pleasure equal to that I get from pictures, from great Venetian pictures. It is like the pleasure I have when I come across a wonderfully beautiful line or verse, or when I catch a strain of infinitely tender melody.’ Isabella was flattered to receive such eloquent letters, and, in December 1895, she made a secret agreement with Berenson whereby he was to be paid five per cent of the purchase price of any painting Isabella bought on his recommendation, with first refusal on anything he was offered. Isabella entered the contract in good faith, little realizing that Berenson was also receiving a commission from Colnaghi’s in London on any sale he made for the firm. One of his first coups had been selling his new client Lord Ashburnham’s the Tragedy of Lucretia by Botticelli for £3,200 ($16,000), the first major painting by the artist to enter a North American collection.

It was shortly after the sale of the Botticelli that Berenson heard that the Rape of Europa might be coming on the market. His informant was Otto Gutekunst of Colnaghi’s:

Lord Darnley’s (whose name, by the way must not be mentioned, as he is a very touchy and peculiar man) “Ariosto” is not to be believed. Out of the question! But the Europa is a picture for a great coup. There is absolutely nothing against it, except, perhaps, for some scrupulous fool, the subject, which is very discreetly and quietly treated. You will find all about this in Crowe and Cavalcaselle page 317 etc and chiefly 322 and 323. ’Tis one of the finest and most important Titians in existence. Condition is perfect, not considering the dark varnish, and the landscape alone is a masterpiece of the 1st order. The price is £18,000 but we ought to get 20,000, if anything at all, and will divide whatever he might in the end be willing to take for cash. It would be jolly if Europa came to America?

This letter, from a master dealer, is an excellent example of the chicanery of the art world. Gutekunst was anxious to assure Berenson that he was offering him the genuine article, and therefore carefully quoted the page reference from Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who had written an important monograph on Titian. Gutekunst also knew that Berenson was no respecter of tradition. He had reduced his list of attributions to Titian in Venetian Painters from almost a thousand works to just 133 paintings. He had also launched a devastating attack on the Exhibition of Venetian Paintings held recently at the New Gallery in London’s Oxford St in February 1895. This had been in the form of an alternative catalogue, published two days after the opening of the exhibition, and commenced with an attack on the Titians on view: ‘Of these,’ wrote Berenson,’ one only is by the master … of the thirty-two that remain, a dozen or so have no connection with Titian and are either too remote from our present subject or too poor to require attention.’ The rest were dismissed as obvious copies, or by Titian’s followers and later imitators.

Gutekunst may have deferred to Berenson’s expertise but he showed his skill as an art dealer in dismissing Titian’s Portrait of Ariosto as ‘not to be believed’. This may seem all the more surprising, considering that it was one of Lord Darnley’s most treasured possessions and Colnaghi’s had attempted to buy the portrait just a year previously (he was soon to sell it to the National Gallery for the colossal sum of £30,000). But Gutekunst reasoned that he was much more likely to achieve a sale of the Rape of Europa if it was the only top-quality Titian on the market. And he felt he had his hands full dealing with the ‘touchy and peculiar’ Lord Darnley.

What Gutekunst had not realized was that Berenson was also playing a double game. He had heard that the Duke of Westminster was intending to sell his Blue Boy by Gainsborough, perhaps the most glamorous of all eighteenth-century English portraits. Bernard therefore calculated that he could earn considerably more if he offered the Gainsborough to Isabella, together with a lesser work by Titian, and sold the Rape of Europa to another client. His choice was Mrs Warren, a wealthy Boston society hostess and rival of Isabella, who had helped to fund his early travels in Europe, and whose husband was President of the Trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

On 26 April he wrote to Isabella offering her two paintings: Titian’s Portrait of Maria of Austria and her daughter for £10,000 and the Blue Boy for the much greater sum of £35,000 ($150,000). Berenson made his best sales pitch, claiming the painting as Gainsborough’s masterpiece, and urging Mrs Gardner ‘BE BOLD’, and was gratified to find that his client at once cabled back her acceptance. She did, however, question the price, writing, with a touch of melodramatic humour, that ‘although the price is huge, it is possible. Now, you see me steeped in debt – perhaps in Crime – as the result!’ She then added that it would mean that she would ‘have to Starve and go naked for the rest of my life; and probably in a debtor’s prison’.

There was a slight hiccup in Berenson’s master-plan when Gutekunst struggled to produce an adequate photograph, but eventually he managed to acquire one by late April, writing triumphantly ‘and now my friend, three cheers, for I’ve got the Europa photo at last’, unaware that Berenson was going to send it to Mrs Warren, not to Mrs Gardner. Fortunately, the late appearance of the photograph saved the day for Berenson. The Duke of Westminster had decided to keep the Blue Boy and Berenson realized that his offer of the Rape of Europa to Mrs Warren risked alienating his best client. Anxious to make amends, he determined to offer the Rape of Europa to Isabella instead. Sitting in the Hotel Hassler in Rome, he composed a long letter to her on 10 May, a masterpiece of the epistolary art. The letter begins with a long preamble, ending with characteristic Berenson flattery: ‘and what sincerely I value most, the opportunity of supremely pleasing you.’

The failure to acquire the Blue Boy was laid fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the owner: ‘What happened was this. The owner of the Blue Boy seems to have wanted to see what serious offer would be made for his picture, and this having been made – £30,000 – he then firmly said that he had not the remotest intention of selling, and that no price could possibly tempt him. There the matter stands. Do forgive my having excited you in vain. Your disappointment can not be greater than mine. The only consolation is that in our life-time the Blue Boy will not leave its present owner, without its going to you, if you continue to want it. Of that much I trust I can assure you [not true, as it was bought by Joseph Duveen in 1921 who promptly sold it to Henry Huntington for £182,200 ($728,800) – 90,000 people queued up to see it in the National Gallery, where it was put briefly on display before its departure for California].’

The central part of Berenson’s letter dealt with his near-fatal error in offering the Rape of Europa to Mrs Warren. Having congratulated Isabella on the purchase of Titian’s Portrait of Maria of Austria and her daughter, he continued in his very best style:

Now, on bended knee I must make a frightful confession. Just a week ago I thought The Blue Boy so certainly yours that I did something stupid in consequence. ’Tis a tale with a preface, and this you must briefly hear. One of the few great Titians in the world is the Europa – which was painted for Philip II of Spain, and as we know from Titian’s own letter to the king, despatched to Madrid in April 1562. Being in every way of the most poetical feeling and of the most gorgeous colouring, that greatest of all the world’s amateurs, the unfortunate Charles I of England had it given to him when he was at Madrid negotiating for the hand of Philip the Fourth’s sister. It was then packed up to await his departure. But the negotiations came to nothing, and Charles left Madrid precipitately. The picture remained carefully packed – this partly accounts for its marvellous preservation – and finally came in the last century into the Orléans collection. When that was sold some hundred years ago, the Europa fell into the hands of a lord whose name I forget, then into Lord Darnley’s, and now it is probably to be bought for the not extraordinary price of £20,000 (twenty thousand pounds). This is my preface. Now listen to my doleful tale. Of all this I became aware just a week ago when I had no doubt I could get you The Blue Boy. I reasoned that you would not likely want to spend £20,000 on top of £38,000. But the Titian Europa is the finest Italian picture ever again to be sold – I hated its going elsewhere than to America, and if possible to Boston. So in my despair I immediately wrote to Mrs S. D. Warren urging her to buy it.

Berenson’s intention was to excite Isabella with his description of the Titian, and its wonderful history, hoping that she would then overlook the way that he had deceived her by offering it to her society rival Mrs Warren. His attempt to excuse himself by stating that he had done this because he wanted, above all, for the painting to come to Boston was less than honest. Berenson continued by denigrating the Blue Boy (Isbella was never to buy another major British painting) and included a wonderfully effective piece of flattery, linking her surname with Charles I: ‘Now as you can not have The Blue Boy I am dying to have you get the Europa, which in all sincerity, personally I infinitely prefer. It is a far greater picture, great and great tho’ The Blue Boy is. No picture in the world has a more resplendent history, and it would be poetic justice that a picture once intended for a Stewart should at last rest in the hands of a Stewart.’ This flattery was particularly effective and Isabella was to claim a special relationship with Mary, Queen of Scots and was later to commemorate Charles I’s death with a service annually in the chapel of her house.

Berenson now proceeded to dismiss Mrs Warrren’s claim on the painting, and ended with the code he liked to employ on offering Isabella a work of art:

Cable, please the one word YEUP=Yes Europa, or NEUP=No Europa, to Fiesole as usual. I am sending a poor photograph which will suffice if you look patiently to give you an idea.

And now, dear Mrs Gardner, I have told you my doleful tale. Forgive me. Get the Europa, and if you decide to get her – by the way she is on canvas, 5ft 10 high, 6ft 8 broad, signed TITIANUS PINXIT – please do not speak of her to any one until she reaches you, so as to spare me with Mrs Warren. Please address Fiesole until June 3.

Very sincerely yours Bernard Berenson

Won over by Berenson’s persuasive skills, Isabella agreed to pay him on 15 June. Isabella had been an avid reader of Berenson’s Italian Painters of the Renaissance, and the volume on the Venetian School had only recently appeared in 1894. Berenson’s writing was so eloquent and she, like so many others, had been entranced by his description of the artist’s late style:

Titian’s real greatness consists in the fact that he was able to produce an impression of greater reality as he was ready to appreciate the need for a firmer hold on life. In painting, as has been said, a greater effect of reality is chiefly a matter of light and shadow, to be obtained only by considering the canvas as an enclosed space, filled with light and air, through which the objects are seen. There is more than one way of getting this effect, but Titian attains it by the almost total suppression of outlines, by the harmonizing of colours, and by the largeness and vigour of his brushwork.

What makes Berenson so fascinating is that the eloquent and scholarly aesthete, unsurpassed in his ability to write so eloquently about art, was also capable of the most venal skulduggery. With the sale of the Rape of Europa, he managed to hoodwink both the readily susceptible Isabella but also the much more wily Otto Gutekunst. Gutekunst had offered Lord Darnley £14,000 for the Titian, and had recommended his colleague to lower the asking price from £20,000 to £18,000. But Berenson held out for the £20,000 without telling Gutekunst, and when he received the full amount from Isabella, send Gutekunst a cheque for £2,000 i.e. 50 per cent of the balance between the £14,000 Darnley received and the £18,000 that the Colnaghi’s dealer thought Isabella had paid. This sharp practice enabled him to pocket an extra £2,000 as well as the commission he received from Isabella.

The acquisition of the Rape of Europa gave Isabella a focus for her collection, a confirmation of her lifelong passion for Italian paintings. She was to build her house at Fenway Court on the outskirts of Boston in the Venetian style, strongly influenced by the Palazzo Barbaro, with a room specifically dedicated to her prize. Berenson shared his patron’s desire to promote their home town of Boston as an artistic and intellectual centre. Though Boston’s great days as a political centre were long past, Bostonians still took great pride in the part she had played in the American War of Independence: the Boston Tea Party, and the battles of Lexington and Concord, the first military actions in the Revolutionary War. Her leading citizens included John Adams, second President of the United States.

This was Boston’s heritage and now Berenson wanted the city to build on this and become a great art centre like the cities of Renaissance Italy, with Isabella filling the role of her namesake Isabella d’Este, Duchess of Ferrara, patron of Andrea Mantegna, Pietro Perugino, Giovanni Bellini and, most important of all, Leonardo da Vinci. He eulogized:

If we are to build up on American soil cities like Florence, world-renowned for art and science even more so than commerce, we must breed merchant princes, cultured like Rucellai [Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai, a Florentine banker and one of the greatest patrons of the arts in the Quattrocento] and become deeply imbued with his maxim, that it is pleasanter and more honourable to spend money for wise purposes than to make it.

Isabella had spent her money ‘for wise purposes’ in buying the Rape of Europa. Now she was keen to see her purchase. Berenson sympathized with his patron’s impatience, adding: ‘Why can’t I be with you when the Europa is unpacked?’ and describing how honoured he was to help her in creating a museum which ‘shall not be the least among the kingdoms of the earth’. He described the painting as ‘the finest picture that would ever again be sold’, not the first or last time that he would use this phrase.

When the picture still failed to appear, Berenson attempted to distract Isabella by tempting her with other paintings: a Van Dyck portrait, the splendid Earl of Arundel by Rubens and a Rembrandt. At the same time he continued to congratulate her on her purchase, writing from North Berwick, on a trip to Scotland, on 2 August: ‘What a beauty … No wonder Rubens went half mad over it. I beseech you look at the dolphin, and at the head of the bull. There is the whole of great painting!’ Berenson even had the luck to come across a ‘splendid atelier [studio] version’ of the Rape of Europa at Rokeby in Yorkshire.

The original finally arrived in Boston, sailing from England via New York in the ocean liner Lucania, to be greeted ecstatically by its new owner. She cabled Berenson on 26 August: ‘She (Europa) has come! I was just cabling to you to ask what could be the matter, when she arrived safe and sound. She is now in place. I have no words! I feel “all over in one spot,” as we say. I am too excited to talk.’ Isabella was to acquire many great paintings in the following years, but she was never to show the same level of excitement over a purchase. For the first few months after its arrival in Boston, and despite her interest in other works offered by Berenson, notably a Giorgione and a Velázquez, the proud owner continued to wax lyrical over the Titian, eulogizing how ‘every inch of paint in the picture seems full of joy’.

Isabella was much amused by the reaction of staid Bostonians when they visited her house on Beacon Hill, where the painting hung to the left of the fireplace in the living room: ‘She has adorers fairly on their knees – men of course’. This reaction was as nothing compared with the owner’s, who poured out her feelings to Berenson on 19 September, how she was still breathless about the Europa, describing her emotions as ‘a two days’ orgy. The orgy was drinking myself drunk with Europa and then sitting for hours in my Italian garden at Brookline [her country house outside Boston], thinking and dreaming about her’. She continued with a list of the notable aesthetes and collectors who had ‘wallowed at her feet’, one of whom, Edward William Hooper, a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, described Isabella as ‘the Boston end of the Arabian nights’. The letter ended: ‘Good night. I am very sleepy after my orgy.’

This outpouring of emotion was characteristic of Isabella. Berenson was very pleased that his fellow Bostonians should be so appreciative, and his letter from Ancona on 7 October was couched in a similar indulgent style to Isabella’s: ‘I rejoice for dear old Boston that it hath people who can appreciate Europa, and your own pleasure in her is like a sweet savour to my nostrils.’ But he was soon back to business, anxious to appease Isabella’s hunger to acquire more masterpieces to hang alongside Europa. Pandering to Isabella’s passion for the Titian, his letters made frequent references to it in the context of other paintings he hoped to acquire for her.

In Van Dyck’s Lady with a Rose ‘the landscape was as fascinating as a Titian’. Rembrandt’s Mill was ‘the most famous landscape in the world … It is a poem of solemnity and depth that would join in most symphoniously with that gayer gravity of Europa’ (Isabella was not convinced and it was Widener who was to purchase the painting for $500,000 in 1911; it now hangs in the National Gallery in Washington). When drawing Isabella’s attention to a Watteau, Berenson made a well-judged comparison: ‘He [Watteau] is not Titian ’tis true, but Herrick [a minor seventeenth-century poet] is not Shakespeare, yet there are moods, and they come often, when one prefers the magician of sweetness to the enchanter of grandeur.’

There was more than an element of hyberbole in Berenson’s description of the paintings he was offering Isabella: a Music Lesson by Terborch (a good but certainly not great Dutch seventeenth-century genre painter) who had ‘the strength and simplicity of Manet at his best. In colour he rivals Titian and Giorgione’; a Correggio of a Girl pulling a Thorn out of her Foot (later dismissed as a school picture in poor condition) was ‘the daintiest, most feminine, loveliest nude you ever saw … an astounding masterpiece, by a painter surely ranked with Titian, Giorgione and Raphael among Italian artists’.

Berenson knew that Raphael ranked alongside Titian in Isabella’s estimation and he was determined to acquire works for her by the artist. When nothing was available, he had warned her: ‘Remember that Raphael is not a great painter in the sense that Titian or Veronese or Velázquez or Reubens are’. This did nothing to dampen Isabella’s desire to acquire a work by Raphael and Berenson’s derogatory verdict changed dramatically when his Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami appeared on the market.

He described the Raphael portrait, in a letter dated January 1898: ‘Well, if I had been asked what in the whole range of art seemed hardest to acquire I should have said a portrait of any kind by Raphael.’ Isabella was only too willing to oblige, and the portrait was to form the centrepiece of the Raphael Room on the second floor of the museum at Fenway. It was joined by his Pietà, the predella panel to his Colonna altarpiece. Berenson argued: ‘you can get the little gem for £5,000 … There will be no other chance in our life-times if ever to acquire a first-rate Raphael, at such a price.’ He was also happy to boast of his own good judgement, denigrating the Colonna altarpiece (Metropolitan Museum), purchased by the fabulously wealthy John Pierpont Morgan, ‘the one I urged you not to buy – is exhibited in London at the Old Masters, and critics, I am happy to note, are pretty well agreed about its worthlessness’.

Isabella’s passion for Raphael reflected the artist’s continuing popularity as the most sought after of all Old Masters. The Ansidei Madonna was bought by the National Gallery at the Blenheim Palace sale in 1885 for £70,000 ($350,000), an incredibly large sum at that date. A generation later the Cowper Madonna was sold to Joseph Widener in 1914 for $565,000. But even this price was dwarfed by the sale of the Niccolini-Cowper Madonna to Andrew Mellon in 1928 for $875,000 (both paintings were sold by descendants of the Third Earl Cowper who bought them on the Grand Tour in Florence in the 1770s; they now hang in the National Gallery in Washington). Not content with this, when Mellon agreed to buy 20 paintings from Stalin in 1930–1, Raphael’s Alba Madonna cost $1,166,400 out of a total of $7 million.

Berenson could now claim that Isabella was the proud possessor of a group of paintings that ‘all the European collections could envy’. The Raphaels were exceptional paintings, but Isabella was, in general, becoming more discriminating in her taste. This was mainly due to financial reasons. As she described it in a letter to Berenson on 8 February 1897 when rejecting a portrait by George Romney: ‘It is a question of money – I am now forced to buy only the Greatest things in the world, because they are the only ones I can afford to go into debt for … Europa and Philip and Van Dyck have drowned me in a Sea of debt.’ In rejecting the Romney, Isabella was going against the trend. Glamorous British portraits were becoming all the rage with American collectors and consequently fetching enormous prices. Morgan paid £30,000 ($150,000) for Gainsborough’s Portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire in 1901 but confessed: ‘If the truth [about the price] came out, I might be considered a candidate for the lunatic asylum’. Twenty years later British portraits were still in fashion, Henry Huntington paying $728,800 for Gainsborough’s Blue Boy in 1921.

Isabella was unable to compete with these enormous prices; she lamented to Berenson the constrictions placed on her spending power:

The income of mine was all very well until I began to buy big things. The purchase of Europa and the Bull was the 1st time I had to dip into the capital. And since then those times have steadily multiplied … Probably much of the misunderstanding comes from the way I spend my money. I fancy I am the only living American who puts everything into works of art and music; I mean, instead of into show, and meat and drink.

She was, however, willing to forego some luxuries, writing in her most flirtatious fashion: ‘You would laugh to see me. I haven’t had one new frock for a year.’

Isabella was happy to joke about her financial affairs with Berenson but her husband Jack was less amused. He was suspicious of Berenson’s financial probity, and it was under Jack’s influence that she confided to her adviser: ‘They say (there seem to be many) that you have been dishonest in your money dealings with people who have bought pictures.’ The niggling feeling that Jack was right lingered on after her husband’s death in December 1898. When Bernard offered her Holbein’s portraits of Sir William and Lady Butts the next year, she wrote to him: ‘Tell me exactly what you paid for the Holbeins. I have a most singular letter from the owners. I am afraid something is wrong with the transaction … It looks as if it might be a question for the law courts.’

The sober tone of this letter convinced Berenson that he must be careful in future. When he contacted Isabella with news that another major Titian was coming on to the market, he offered to lower his 5 per cent commission. The painting in question was Sacred and Profane Love, widely considered the most beautiful of Titian’s early works, and a painting worthy to hang alongside the Rape of Europa. When Berenson heard news in July 1899 that the Borghese family in Rome was considering selling it, he hastened to convince Isabella that it would be ‘a title of glory in one’s life-time, and of immortality thereafter’. He then proceeded to tell her that the painting was on sale for ‘about 818,169 dollars’ (the word ‘about’ speaks volumes for Berenson’s financial dealings as a picture dealer).

There were major obstacles to overcome, however, if the sale was to go through. There was a growing furore in Europe over the sale of so many artistic masterpieces to collectors in the United States. European governments appeared powerless to stem the flow of works of art crossing the Atlantic. A cartoon in the New York satirical magazine Puck in June 1911, with the simple title The Magnet, showed John Pierpont Morgan, with his characteristic top hat and carbuncled nose, moving his dollar magnet across the Atlantic towards Europe, with inevitable consequences.

The Italian government determined to issue export licences to prevent the unrestricted export of works of art. In the case of Sacred and Profane Love Isabella’s trustees were reluctant to part with such a large sum of money but this was no bar to the Rothschild family who were determined to acquire the Titian at any price, offering the incredible sum of 4,000,000 lire for the painting (the Villa Borghese and the whole collection was only valued at 3,600,000 lire). In the event the Italian government stepped in, acquiring the whole Borghese collection for the nation, and Sacred and Profane Love remains at the Villa in Rome, where it has become the iconic symbol of the museum.

Isabella was no more successful in acquiring a second major Titian belonging to the Earl of Darnley, the so-called Portrait of Ariosto (as a major Italian Renaissance poet he was of particular interest to the literary – minded Isabella), which Gutekunst had mentioned to Berenson in the context of the Rape of Europa several years previously. The Eighth Earl (as the Hon. Ivo Bligh, he had captained the England cricket team to Australia in 1882 and reclaimed the Ashes – the term was coined by a cricketing columnist penning a mock obituary of English cricket) had inherited Cobham Hall in 1900 and was soon in financial difficulties. In 1903 Robert Ross, friend of the disgraced Oscar Wilde, wrote to Herbert Horne, the art collector and Botticelli expert living in Florence, about a surprise visitor to the Carfax Gallery, which he was running in London. Ross was intrigued by the conversation that ensued and recorded: ‘Lord Darnley came and paid us a visit. He was very nice but stupid. He said the picture [the Portrait of Ariosto] was not for sale in the ordinary way, but that he might consider an offer of £40,000 clear. Certainly not less.’ Horne was well aware of the fabulous collection at Fenway Court in Boston, much of it bought through the services of his Florentine neighbour Bernard Berenson, but, before a deal could be done, the National Gallery intervened, paying £30,000 to acquire the portrait (now known as Young Man with a Blue Sleeve).

By now the professional relationship between Isabella and Berenson had cooled as the level of her acquisitions dropped. He had, however, played a vital role in creating one of the great art collections in North America, including works by Titian, Raphael, Botticelli, Rembrandt, Rubens and Velázquez. In doing so, Berenson may have been guilty of sharp practice, but Isabella herself was also capable of disreputable dealing. In November 1900 she wrote to Berenson about the Chigi Botticelli Madonna and Child: ‘can it be sent to me smuggled, do you think, so that I may get it here now, as soon as possible, without any duties?’

In the event the sale caused a furore, and Prince Chigi was fined by the Italian government for selling it without an export licence. The fine was 315,000 lire ($63,000), the amount he received, though, once the fracas had died down, it was reduced on appeal to 20,000 lire, later still to just 10 lire. Berenson had originally told Isabella that the painting was over-priced at $30,000 but, a few months later, advised her to buy it at $70,000, making a handy profit of $7,000 on the deal. Such was the painting’s fame that it was exhibited at Colnaghi’s in London en route to Boston.

In addition, regardless of the money he was making from Isabella, Berenson was genuinely fond of her. He recorded his feelings in September 1897 in a heart-felt tribute:

Mrs Gardner grows on me from moment to moment. She is the one and only real potentate I have ever known. She lives at a rate and intensity, and with a reality that makes other lives seem pale, thin, and shadowy. What has she not done? Nothing I fancy that she has really wanted. Then she seems really fond of me, not of my petty repute, nor the books I have published, and that is charming.

Seven years later Isabella had become one of the wonders of the New World. Berenson gave a wonderfully flattering description of the transformation: ‘You have become, here in Europe, a most marvellous American myth, and people repeat stories about you as they must have done about Semiramis or Cleopatra or Elizabeth or Catherine the Great of Russia.’ Isabella responded to his flattery and loved the whole idea of creating something unique in America, writing in jest: ‘Shan’t you and I have fun with my museum’.

The flirtatious nature of their correspondence has led to suggestions that Isabella and Berenson had an affair, but there is no positive evidence of this and it must remain pure supposition. Isabella certainly treasured a youthful photograph Berenson gave her of himself in profile, his boyish face, full, curving lips and wavy dark hair curling down over the collar of his coat like some romantic poet. There was no love lost between Jack Gardner and Berenson, but this appears to have been based on Jack’s well-founded suspicion of Bernard’s underhand dealings in overcharging Isabella for paintings he bought for her. Jack was known to be touchy. He had made Isabella promise not to show Sargent’s portrait of her, with a string of pearls round her waist, in public. He had also threatened to horsewhip anyone he heard telling the joke going round town that Sargent had painted Isabella ‘down to Crawford’s notch’, a pun on a resort in New Hampshire and the name of Francis Crawford, one of Isabella’s admirers.

Jack Gardner may have been over-suspicious of Berenson, but he was not alone in his view. The painter Mary Cassatt saw through him immediately. ‘I don’t care for Berenson,’ she wrote, ‘he is a bit too commercial for me’. The art historian had written to his cousin, the lawyer Lawrence Berenson, in a letter dated 17 October 1922, a defence of his actions: ‘I do not earn money by trade. I earn it by enjoying such authority & prestige that people will not buy expensive Italian pictures without my approval.’ For Gutekunst, who knew the business activities of Berenson as well as anyone, this lofty attitude was not good enough. ‘Business is not always nice’, he reminded his colleague. ‘I am the last man to blame you, a literary man, for disliking it. But you want to make money like ourselves so you must do likewise as we do and keep a watchful eye on all the good pictures and collections you know or hear of and let me know in good time … If the pictures you put up to us do not suit Mrs G. it does not matter, we will buy them all the same with you or by giving you an interest in them – as you please. Make hay while Mrs G. shines.’

Following Jack Gardner’s death Gutekunst, knowing that neither he nor Berenson would enjoy such a windfall again, wanted to know exactly how rich Isabella was. But he resented the fact that Berenson passed on the blame for any suggestion of financial impropriety in his dealings on Colnaghi’s. This resentment increased over the years, as Berenson gradually acquired the status of a great aesthete, pontificating on the arts from his villa at I Tatti outside Florence. Much later, in 1934, Gutekunst, whose career never reached such exalted heights, wrote bitterly to his former colleague: ‘are not you all, like us, just after money – we openly, you quietly & less candidly! … We know too much of one another … But I do mightily resent this high brow & superior attitude.’

By this date, however, Berenson was immune to criticism. He was basking in his reputation as the greatest connoisseur of his day, and numbered as his protégés Kenneth Clark, recently appointed as the youngest ever Director of the National Gallery in London. He was happy to brush over any hint of impropriety in his association with Joseph Duveen, the most successful dealer to cash in on the boom in American art collecting. A descendant of Jewish-Dutch immigrants who had settled in Hull, Duveen entered a partnership with Berenson which lasted from 1912 to 1937 (Duveen was reputed to have paid him an annual retainer of £25,000 for his attributions). He was absolutely clear about his aims, which he summed up with admirable succinctness: ‘Europe has a great deal of art, and America has a great deal of money’. A salesman of genius, Duveen managed to persuade his clients, including Henry Clay Frick, the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, Henry E. Huntington, J. P. Morgan, Samuel H. Kress, Andrew Mellon and John D. Rockerfeller, that purchasing works of art would buy them class. In particular buying Italian Renaissance art showed their discerning taste and aesthetic judgement.

The partnership was so successful that Berenson could later joke that most of the Italian paintings entering America in the early twentieth century had his visa on their passport. The fact that Duveen and Berenson were both Jewish, and some of their clients were almost certainly anti-Semitic, makes their achievement all the more remarkable. Duveen himself ended up as Baron Duveen of Milbank and his legacy is the Duveen Gallery of the British Museum, housing the Elgin Marbles, and the major extension to the Tate Gallery. In America he was instrumental in the building of the National Gallery in Washington. Between them, Duveen and Berenson succeeded in selling numerous Old Masters to the great collectors who then founded museums in which they were displayed. The first, and in many ways the most remarkable of these, opened in Boston in 1903.

Isabella had taken the decision to build a museum to house her ever-expanding collection in 1899. During a tour to Venice in 1897 the Gardners had spent a considerable time collecting architectural elements for the new building, which was to stand on a patch of land in the Back Bay Fens, recently landscaped by the architect Frederic Law Olmsted. But before work could begin Jack Gardner died of a stroke on 10 December 1898. Nevertheless, Isabella went ahead and acquired a suitable site for her ‘Venetian palazzo’, known as Fenway Court, using funds from his estate, valued at $3,600,000.

The marshy site resembled her beloved Venice, with the foundations of the house resting on piles driven into the mud, in the way Venetian palaces had been erected over the centuries. The centre of the building was a Venetian style courtyard modelled on Palazzo Barbaro, an oasis of greenery, with a Roman mosaic as its centrepiece. The walls were encrusted with pieces of inset sculpture and so successfully was this done that it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the old pieces, bought in Venice, and pastiches made in Boston. The Italianate feel of the courtyard was enhanced by the red tiled roof and overhanging cornice.

This Italian style was already in evidence in other Boston landmarks, such as the Public Library, and stood in contrast with the French Renaissance chateau style favoured by the Vanderbilts in the extravagant mansions they were building in Newport, Rhode Island, at the same time. To counter the cold of the Boston winter, Isabella intended to capture a Mediterranean feeling by roofing the court and surrounding the central mosaic with palm and mimosa trees. Isabella’s friend Sylvester Baxter, writing in the Century Magazine in 1904, summed up the inspiration of Venice:

Yes, we are in Italy! Or at least, Italy has come to us. … there are Venetian colonnades about the cloisters, Venetian windows looking upon the court, Venetian balconies, Venetian loggias, Venetian carvings embedded in the walls, Venetian stairs – all genuine, all ancient, all stones of Venice bearing the incomparable hue of age, touched with the friendly touch of time, weather-worn, smoothed and rounded by the centuries and here reverently placed to endure for a new lifetime in a new Renaissance for the new world.

The motto over the door, however, was French and read C’est mon plaisir. This light-hearted allusion to pleasure harked back to the palace of Sanssouci (without a care) built for Frederick the Great at Potsdam when he wanted to escape from the cares of office in his capital of Berlin. In fact, Isabella’s motto is closer in feel to Louis XIV’s famous statement: L’etat c’est moi, and it was clear to all visitors to the museum that she was going to emulate the Sun King in controlling every aspect of the building and its collection. For Sylvester Baxter:

Fenway Court was not only planned by its owner, in a way she was an actual builder of the house to an extent unprecedented in association with the execution of plans of such magnitude and scope. Virtually Mrs Gardner was her own architect.

The long-suffering architect William T. Sears must have lived to rue this motto, as he had to endure constant interference from his patron to bring the project to fruition. Sears’ patience was sorely tested by his patron’s insistence on involving herself in every detail of the design. He recorded his travails in his diary:

Sullivan [one of the key workmen] said she called him a liar and he would not do any more work for her.

She insisted one of the wood panels had been placed bottom end up, but later said it was all right.

When the local authorities failed to provide a permit for the Carriage Shed, Isabella, who regarded herself as above the rules, declared loftily:

Go ahead and build it without a permit, if the City stops me I will not open my museum to the public.

Locals were amused by the palace rising on the edge of the park. Morris Carter recorded the reaction of the Boston Herald on 10 April 1901 to the ‘huge structure … going up before the astonished gaze of residents of the Back Bay district’. One stranger had asked if it was to be a warehouse and receive the reply: ‘Begorra, it ’ud make a foine brewery’, but it was generally referred to in the neighbourhood as ‘Missus Gardyner’s Eyetalian palace.’

The building was finally completed by the end of 1902 and a spectacular inaugural party was held on New Year’s Day 1903. On a cold, clear evening the cream of Boston society alighted from their carriages at the entrance to be greeted by a tall Italian major domo, as Morris Carter recorded:

On the landing at the top of the horseshoe stood Mrs Gardner, dressed in black, her diamond antennae waving above her head; up the stairs the representatives of Boston’s proudest families climbed to greet their hostess, and then – except the chosen few, perhaps possessing less family pride, whom she invited to sit in the balcony – they climbed down the other side, some of them inwardly fuming, but most of them amused at the homage Mrs Gardner had exacted of them.

The select audience then listened to a performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra of Bach, Mozart and Schumann, presided over by Isabella seated in a carved and gilded armchair. When the music finished, the mirrored doors of the Music Room were rolled back, and guests gasped at the sight of the court, illuminated by Japanese lanterns and filled with the scent of flowers and the sound of water.

‘While the courtyard is yet in an unfinished state,’ reported the Boston Advertiser, ‘it already gives promise of beauty and picturesqueness even beyond that anticipated by those who understand that Mrs Gardner executes her projects in brilliant and inimitable fashion.’ The guests were then encouraged to wander through the rooms, admiring the priceless works of art on display in hushed silence. They were quite overwhelmed, ‘the aesthetic perfection of all things’, in the words of Henry James’ brother William, ‘making them quiet and docile and self-forgetful and kind, as if they had become as children’.

Charles Eliot Norton, one of the few allowed into Fenway Court before its official opening, took justified pride in his former pupil’s achievement:

I have been admitted several times to see Mrs Gardner’s still unfinished palace and have seen her collection of art. Palace and gallery (there is no other word for it) are such an exhibition of the genius of a woman of wealth as never seen before. The building of which she is the sole architect is admirably designed. I know of no private collection in Europe which compares with this in the uniform high level of the works it contains.

At the heart of the museum was a Venetian salone, known as the Titian Room. The salone was designed around Isabella’s greatest coup, the acquisition of the Rape of Europa. Every detail was carefully worked out, with the painter’s great work placed beside the window on to the park, so that it would catch the maximum amount of sunlight flooding in. Isabella surrounded the painting with religious works by Titian’s contemporary Paris Bordone and from the workshop of Giovanni Bellini, his first master, together with portraits by other sixteenth-century Italian artists, Baccio Bandinelli and Giovanni Battista Moroni, and a magnificent Velázquez of Philip IV, the owner of the Titian (it had been commissioned by his grandfather Philip II), which hung above a monumental bronze bust by Benvenuto Cellini. The Titian itself was placed above two Venetian end tables, a putto attributed to the French sculptor Francois Duquesnoy, mimicking the pose of Europa, and a watercolour attributed to Van Dyck after the copy Rubens had made of the Titian. The walls of the room were of red brocade, and below the Titian, to give a particularly personal touch, Isabella placed a section of green silk, part of one of her evening dresses designed by Charles Worth.

For Isabella this painting was the centrepiece of her ‘Borgo Allegro [happy place]’, as she called her museum. It was the painting Henry James referred to when he commiserated with his friend after she broke her leg falling on the ice in February 1902: ‘My imagination shoved rose leaves, as it were, under the spine of a lady for whom lying fractured was but an occasion the more to foregather with Titian. Seriously, I hope you weren’t very bad – that it was nothing more than the “Europa” could bandage up with a piece of that purple of which you gave me so memorable an account.’

Following the triumphant opening of the museum Isabella decided to allow 200 members of the public to enter the sacred premises on specific open days, initially for two weeks every year, in the spring and the autumn. They were to pay $1 each, tickets sold in advance. Remarkably, her collection of European art was superior to that of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which was to open to the public in 1909.

Isabella lived on the fourth floor of the museum, and would come downstairs to entertain the leading intellectual and artistic figures of the time: Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes (the most widely respected judge in America), Charles Eliot Norton, the Berensons, John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler. She was a generous benefactor to talented young artists and musicians, giving a cello to the young Catalan cellist Pablo Casals. Isabella was becoming increasingly imperious, and was often seen seated on an ancient marble throne in the courtyard of the museum, gazing at the mosaic of Medusa in the centre, the Gorgon’s head encircled by snakes.

Isabella loved to portray herself as a cultural icon. She was more than happy to entertain her friends, but tended to treat the public with regal disdain. One day one of the guardians, Corinna Putnam Smith, entered the Titian Room and spotted that ‘a young woman, timid-looking, almost pathetic, was gazing’ at Europa. ‘On observing that [she] was about to jot something down in a minute notebook, I was about to inform her kindly that this was against regulations, when Mrs Gardner pounced on her like a fury, shouting ‘Don’t you know you are breaking a rule?’ The unfortunate girl fled from the room in tears but was later invited to lunch by the repentant owner, with the chance to spend a whole day in the museum. Subsequently, Isabella’s decision to enrol Harvard students to help oversee the rooms in the museum was a great success, the students taking great pride in their role. Girls brought in to help from Radcliff College were less complimentary, noting how Isabella’s face was covered in powder and rouge, and that she sported an outrageous yellow wig.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was a truly remarkable institution and Isabella was anxious that people should understand the reasons for its creation. In 1917 she wrote to her friend Edmund Hill, describing why she had created the museum:

Years ago I decided that the greatest need in our Country was Art. We were largely developing the other sides. We were a very young country and had very few opportunities of seeing beautiful things, works of art etc. So I determined to make it my life’s work if I could. Therefore, ever since my parents died I have spent every cent I inherited (for that was my money) in bringing about the object of my life.

The writer Edith Wharton, descended from one of the grand old families of New York (her father was George Frederic Jones, and the expression ‘Keep up with the Joneses’ originated with her father’s family) and a friend of Berenson’s, compared the museum to the ones she knew so well in Europe. ‘Of course I have seen Palazzo Gardner,’ she wrote, ‘her collection is marvellous, and looks beautifully in its new setting, but a spirit of opposition roused in me when I am told “there is nothing like it in Europe”.’ Henry James took the opposite viewpoint, taking ‘an acute satisfaction in seeing America stretch out her long arm and rake in, across the green cloth of the wide Atlantic, the highest prizes of the game of civilization.’

Bernard and Mary Berenson had contrary views of Isabella and her museum. The art historian retained a real affection for his former patron. Although their business relationship had ceased in the early years of the twentieth century, he had loyally offered Isabella the magnificent Feast of the Gods by Bellini and Titian (National Gallery, Washington) when it appeared on the market in 1917, writing cynically: ‘Bless the war, that you have the chance [to buy], for without it the Feast would never have left its old home, nor I be in a position to urge it upon you.’ And visiting her late in her life, when she was ‘a little “gaga” as the French so aptly say’, he loyally took with him paintings by Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Vivarini and two Fra Angelicos, wrapped in bath towels (a wonderfully cavalier approach to the way that important Old Masters should be handled, though Berenson never treated the condition of paintings with the same seriousness as his attributions).

Mary had waxed lyrical when first visiting the museum: ‘We were quite overcome, the whole thing is a work of genius’, adding, in her diary: ‘In beauty and taste it far exceeded our expectations, which were high … One room is more entrancing than another, and the great masterpieces of painting seem mere decoration in the general scheme. I thought there was remarkably little that was not of Bernhard’s choosing, but that little annoyed him immensely and hurt him too.’

By the time of her visit with Berenson in 1920, however, she had changed her tune with a vengeance, possibly because she now thought of Isabella as a tyrant who may not have given her husband full credit for all the work he had done for her. Considering that Isabella had suffered a stroke, and that the Berensons lived a life of great privilege at I Tatti, entertaining the great and the good, in large part due to the money Berenson had made from his art dealings with Isabella, Mary’s behaviour seems astonishingly mean-spirited. She began by launching a personal attack on Isabella:

We went out to see Mrs Gardner today. She will soon die and she must know it, but she is unchanged in her egotism, her malice, her attachment to detail, to nonsensical things. All this, in the days of her vitality, when it seemed as if she couldn’t grow old and die, was actually part of her. But now it is purely pathetic, and a little ugly.

Mary now moved on to savage the museum her husband had done so much to create: ‘But the worst of all is that her great Palace, in spite of the marvellous pictures in it, looks to our now enlightened eyes, like a junk shop. There is something horrible in these American collections, in snatching this and that away from its real home and hanging it on a wall of priceless damask made from somewhere else, above furniture higgledepiggled from other places, streamed with objets d’art from other realms.’

It was true that Isabella’s heyday as a collector was long gone, but her prescience and good fortune meant that she had been ahead of the game. Though she often lamented ‘Woe is me! Why am I not Morgan or Frick?’, she had formed the bulk of her collection before they entered the art market. Now, in old age, she was increasingly preoccupied with what would happen to the museum after her death. She had always cultivated impressionable young men and had taken a shine to Morris Carter, a Harvard graduate who was librarian at the Museum of Fine Arts. By 1908 she was hard at work persuading him to come to live at Fenway Court. Carter tried to resist, commenting: ‘shan’t I, like a very poor person, be extravagant with other people’s money?’, but resistance proved futile. He was presented with a piece of land at Brookline, Isabella’s country estate, on which he planned to build a house, but soon discovered that his benefactress intended to take control of the construction. Carter realized the real reason for Isabella’s generosity: she intended him to be the first Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Living in such proximity to this powerful lady, Carter was under no illusion of the scale of the task he was to confront. This was outlined by Isabella’s cousin John Chipman Gray, who had drawn up a legal document enshrining his cousin’s wishes: ‘I direct that Morris Carter shall be director of the Museum. He shall have the power to make suitable rules for the conduct of employees and visitors … He shall have the sole power of appointing and dismissing … subordinate officers and employees.’

There were, however, stringent limitations to Carter’s powers. Not only was he commanded to live on site, he was even told how much holiday he was allowed to take. On Isabella’s birthday, 14 April, he was instructed to hold a memorial service in the chapel at the end of the Long Gallery, as though Isabella was a saint or a queen. More seriously, Carter was forbidden to move a single object in the museum. If he had the temerity to do so, the whole collection would be put up for sale by the President and Fellows of Harvard. On 14 July 1924 Isabella died in Fenway Court. Like some Old World monarch she had left precise instructions: ‘Carry my coffin high – on the shoulders of the bearers’, adding, characteristically: ‘They will have to be told exactly what to do’. A mass was to be said daily for her soul by the priests from the Society of St John the Evangelist. No doubt Philip II, who had commissioned the greatest work of art in her museum, would have approved.

Carter had been appointed to tend the Gardner flame, and he never really escaped the long shadow cast by his former employer. From beyond the grave it seemed that Isabella was watching his every move. The board of the museum, composed of the conservative old guard of Boston, approved of the policy of minimal change and it was not until the 1930s that electricity replaced gaslight in the museum. When Carter tried to introduce changes, he found his every move observed. Isabella had begun a tradition of filling the courtyard of Fenway Court at Easter with nasturtiums. But in May 1929 the nasturtiums were missing from the floral display. The Boston Herald, sympathetic to Carter’s predicament, drew this faux pas to its readers’ attention:

It is only when the word ‘nasturtiums’ is mentioned that a gleam of madness shines from his [Morris Carter’s] mild eye. If it has been a hard day, he may even be heard to utter dark threats of murder by strangulation. It appears that during Mrs Gardner’s lifetime, when the palace was open to the public in April, the small balconies above the courtyard were filled with brilliant nasturtiums … Apparently no one who saw the court with the nasturtiums has ever forgotten them, and as a result the unfortunate curator is hounded – no matter what the season – with the remark: ‘Mrs Gardner used to have nasturtiums growing from those balconies – don’t you ever have them now?’ … Those who [have seen the nasturtiums in the courtyard] will realize why no one ever forgets them and also why the patience of the long-suffering curators will still continue to be tried by observant ladies who walk past the Titians but gasp with emotion over a few green tendrils covered with crimson blossom.

Since Carter’s long tenure in office (1924–55), there have been only three directors of the museum. The first of these was George Stout (1955–70), a diligent and meticulous student of the art of restoration, who had learned his trade in the conservation department at the Fogg Art Museum in Boston. During the 1930s, with the help of the departmental chemist, John Gettens, he pioneered research into the raw materials of painting – the pigments, oils, gums, resins and glues – and studied the causes of deterioration in a painting and the ways of preventing this. Stout’s meticulous attention to the principles of conservation (he established the conservation department at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1933) were widely accepted and were adopted by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Fogg Art Museum and the Worcester Art Museum, three of the most important museums in Massachusetts.

Stout himself, however, is best remembered for his extra-ordinary work in recovering works of art in Europe at the end of the Second World War. His heroic exploits have recently been dramatized in the film The Monuments Men, where the dapper restorer is played by the rather unlikely figure of the glamorous George Clooney. During the war the art of conservation, hitherto restricted to the dusty back corridors of museums, suddenly assumed much greater importance. The allies realized that they urgently needed to preserve world-famous works of art in the coming conflict. Nazi Germany had stolen millions of cultural objects from the countries it had conquered, including some of Europe’s greatest art treasures.

Stout left his job in training museum curators in the art of conservation, and early in 1944 he joined the newly formed Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section of the Allied armies, shortened to MFAA or, as they came to be called, the Monuments Men. Following the D-Day landings this unit, initially consisting of just 15 men, eight American and seven British, and possessing no offices, vehicles or support staff, were assigned to the allied armies to try to mitigate damage to churches, museums and other important monuments between the English Channel and Berlin, a truly herculean task. In addition, they were authorized to locate stolen or missing works of art. Stout and his colleagues could not even rely on allied generals to help them, since General Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, had instructed his senior officers that if they had to choose between preserving a monument or protecting their troops, ‘the lives of our men are paramount’.

Undaunted, the members of the MFAA set to work. The most impressive act that the unit performed during the campaign of 1944–5 was at the Merkers mine complex which the American army captured on 6 April 1945. This was one of the biggest salt mines in Thuringia, consisting of a total of 35 miles of tunnels. When Stout arrived five days later, he was amazed to discover an artistic treasure trove, consisting of some of the most important Old Masters from the Prussian royal collection, Albrecht Durer’s original woodcuts for the Apocalypse series, priceless Egyptian papyri, Greek and Roman antiquities, Byzantine mosaics and Islamic rugs. It turned out that Dr Paul Ortwin Rave, a dedicated museum professional, had just organized delivery from Berlin of this irreplaceable collection of art at the very moment when the Russians were shelling the German capital.

This artistic cornucopia was stored deep underground and it was difficult and dangerous work trying to locate the works of art in such dark, cold and damp conditions, with minimal lighting, no maps, narrow and cramped corridors, with the perpetual threat that the next compartment might have been booby-trapped by the retreating Germans. The situation at the Merkers salt mine was made considerably more complicated by the fact that the Third Reich’s gold reserve was also stored in the mine, and this had attracted the attention of the world’s press. The mine was also in the Russian zone of occupation and there was therefore considerable urgency in moving the works to a better location to keep them out of the hands of the Russians.

General Patton, reluctant to leave behind much-needed troops to guard the gold and the art, and eager to continue his advance into Germany, gave the order for his troops to move out on 15 April, just four days after Stout’s arrival at the mine. Stout immediately began filling any available boxes and crates with a combination of art and gold, using a thousand sheepskin coats from a nearby Luftwaffe depot as packing materials. After working flat out for four days and nights, the first convoy left at daybreak on 15 April. By 9 p.m. the next night the uncrated paintings had also been brought above ground, an even more complicated job. The crates were then loaded and at 8.30 on 17 April the cream of the priceless Prussian state art collection left for Frankfurt in a convoy of 32 ten-ton trucks, with an armed escort including air cover.

Stout went on to remove 80 truckloads of artwork from another salt mine, the Altaussee, in the Austrian Alps and, with typical thoroughness, managed to inspect most of the Nazi repositories between the Rhine and Berlin. After Germany’s surrender, he transferred to the Pacific theatre of war, and served as chief of the Arts and Monuments Division in Tokyo at Allied headquarters until mid-1946. Stout’s work has now been given proper recognition, notably by Robert Edsel in his book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, published in 2009, on which the film of The Monuments Men is based.

On returning home, Stout served briefly at the Fogg Museum and the Worcester Art Museum before becoming Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1955. He served there until 1970 and cemented his reputation as one of the greatest experts in the field of conservation, which he placed at the heart of the museum’s philosophy, introducing state of the art climate control and establishing a stable environment for the works of art in the collection. In addition he improved the visibility of the whole collection by upgrading the lighting and controlling the amount of daylight entering the galleries.

Stout was succeeded by Rollin van Nostrand Hadley (1970–89), whose edition of the letters of Isabella Stewart Gardner and Bernard Berenson is a fascinating account of the relationship between a patron and her art adviser. Hadley’s successor Anne Hawley, the current director, inherited her post in the most traumatic circumstances, as she was greeted, almost on arrival, with the devastating news of the burglary that took place at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on 18 March 1990. This was enough to tax the most hardened museum director, but the new incumbent proved more than capable of handling the situation and, under her dynamic directorship, the museum has undergone a transformation. In Hawley’s words Boston ‘sat out the twentieth century in the visual arts’, but ideas such an artist-in-residence have proved hugely successful. More recently, in 2012, the museum opened an extension by Renzo Piano which will serve as a temporary exhibition and performance space. There are apartments for artists-in-residence, and visitors are encouraged to listen to conversations between artists and curators.

For the director and her predecessors, the overriding concern is to respect the wishes of Isabella Stewart Gardner when she created her museum over a century ago. And this means placing the strongest emphasis on the permanent collection, which plays such an important role in attracting visitors to Boston. If the object of Isabella’s life, as she told Edmund Hill, was to give people the opportunity to see beautiful things, then it is Titian’s Rape of Europa more than any other painting, the crowning glory of the museum, which has helped to achieve this.