Word: gardners
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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...
...most alluring painting, a fresco, is Picro della Francesca's Hercules. The Italians also felt this work quite attractive, for laws were established to prevent taking such masterpieces out of the country, Mrs. Gardner had already bought the giant; it was only a question of getting him to Boston. A dealer got last-minute permission for Hercules' export, and the painted plaster took its place in the Museum's Early Italian Room...
Other spoils of Berenson's Italian conquests include Raphael's Pieta and a portrait of a Roman Count, a Guardi scene of Venice, Botticelli's Madonna and Child, Giotto's Jesus, Fra Angelico's Assumption, etc. Few museums equal the Gardner's extensive collection of Italian masters. But Berenson was not to stop at conquering Italian walls; sensing Mrs. Jack's interest in a bargain, he induced her to buy Durer, Holbein, Rubens, and Rembrandt...
...Jack was always doing her own collecting concurrently with art expert Berenson's advice. An example of her personal astuteness was the addition to her collection of Anders Zorn (painter and paintings), whom she met in 1893 at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Mrs. Gardner was walking through the exhibit when she saw a painting that she liked, The Omnibus, she asked a man in the gallery who had done it; it was the artist himself, Anders Zorn. She bought the picture of passengers in a bus, and from there started another of her artist friendships...
Zorn's Mrs. Gardner at Venice is one of the most flattering portraits of the cestatic Mrs. Jack, bursting in from the balcony overlooking The Grand Canal in Venice...