Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Even before Berenson began to cultivate Mrs. Jack's taste in the arts, Mr. and Mrs. Jack Gardner had bought a few paintings on their own- based on their own likes and dislikes. The Concert by Vermeer was bought at the Hotel Druout auction galleries in Paris in 1892; the little Dutch girl seated at the piano with the light streaming in through the window captivated Belle Gardner. In the Gardner Museum's Dutch room today, where the light falls on the stone floor, the Vermeer shines as one of the most exquisite of the artist's works anywhere...
Sargent painted a portrait of Belle Gardner that stirred up quite a few waves along the Charles River: Mrs. Jack was pictured with a black dress wrapped quite tightly for a Boston matron, a V-cut neckline with a single strand of pearls reiterating the circular lines of her tiny waist and a single red ruby dropping from the pearls; the portrait was not nearly as risque as others that Sargent was painting at the time, but when Jack Gardner heard the comments about the picture, he forbid its public exhibition. The gossip was that, "Sargent had painted Mrs. Gardner...
...gossip about F. Marion Crawford was that he read Italian aloud to Mrs. Gardner, Crawford wrote many romantic novels, one concerned with Boston and Mrs. Jack called The American Politician. Van Wyck Brooks had pictured New England after the Civil War as an Indian Summer; Crawford had seasonally pictured this Boston lady as "summer days and flowers and wind-blown water and the happy rustle of spring leaves...
Brooks had yet another picture of Isabella Stewart Gardner: "a local Queen Elizabeth, she cut off heads right and left and stuck them on again if it pleased her to do so; and, when the Bostonians called her an upstart, she cut off their ancestral heads by proving that she belonged to the house of Stuart...
Berenson was also aware of Isabella Stewart Gardner's familial vanity; he sold her portraits of Isabellas and paintings owned by Isabellas, Mrs. Jack "equated herself with all the Isabellas of History- from Spain to Italy- and so thorough was her identification that she would buy any work of art that was at all connected with any one of these illustrious ladies...