Word: gardners
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Something in Boston's air is favorable to eccentrics, and Isabella Stewart Gardner was one of the all-time classics. She began her career in fairly tame fashion, doing all sorts of things that proper Bostonian ladies never did. She was born in New York--perhaps her worst offense. She wore diamonds in her hair. She had an affair with an incipiently bad novelist. She wore French dresses, she collected rubies. She let the painter John Singer Sargent chase her all over the gym at Groton, showed up at the Church of the Advent one Lenten Sunday to scrub...
Eventually she tired of rubies--or perhaps her long-suffering husband tired of buying them for her. She easily made the transition to her next hobby. Mrs. Gardner had a Harvard fixation. Her only child died in infancy, so she took to mothering Harvard men. (Even in advanced age she detested Radcliffe women, regarding them as competition. They returned her sentiments.) At any rate, she often graced Harvard lectures with her presence. Through Charles Eliot Norton, she discovered Dante, and she learned about art. Her businessman husband was intrigued. They began to collect...
...Gardner bought what she liked--that was her only criteria. Bernard Berenson (who would will his Florentine villa to Harvard) was her European buyer; he found that the best way to sell her anything was to claim it had been painted for, or had belonged to, an Isabella. She bought one of the world's 36 Vermeers because she found it "charming," and a portrait of Mary Tudor because the queen wears a pearl that once belonged to Isabella of Spain...
When her husband died in 1898, Mrs. Gardner had amassed an art collection that included Botticellis, Rembrandts and Raphaels. Her house on Beacon Hill was overflowing with paintings and potted palms, so she decided to make use of her spare time and her warehouse full of Italian marbles and build a palace on the newly land-filled Fenway. She changed blueprints daily for five years, infuriating her architects. She was so picky about details that, although in her late 60s, she climbed up a ladder in her central court to blend the exact shade of yellow-pink she wanted...
Lindner and John Horn are expected to return to action today, however, in the number one and five spots respectively. Junior John Ingard, Gary Reiner and Chip Baird hold down the second, third and fourth positions, with Hugh Hyde in the sixth slot. Senior Gardner Rowbothom will play doubles, as may Charlie Krusen...