Word: jacks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...penance and led two lions on the end of a ribbon down the main street of Boston. They swore that three footmen accompanied her carriage when the royalty of England stopped modestly at two. Those who knew her well deny the stories, but nevertheless, the truth about Mrs. Jack as she was called, was sufficiently exciting for the people of Boston around the turn of the century. Today, however, she is remembered as the founder of the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum in Fenway Court...
...Jack lived in the height of society on the water side of Beacon Street which was "right where you ought to be"--in the words of William Mason '10, now assistant director of the Museum. For many years, she had gathered works of art from all over the world. Clever deals enable her to buy great masterpieces at bargain rates. A Vermeer for $6000 was a veritable robbery, but even when prices rose money was no obstacle for things she really wanted. Competition with the great museums of the world meant nothing to her. She devoted her entire fortune...
...this time, her special agent was Bernard Berenson, the precocious art critic who had hobnobbed with his professors as a Harvard undergraduate. Mrs. Jack lent him money to study in Europe after he graduated, an investment which paid off in opportunities to buy great paintings she could not without his aid. Through him, she bought Titian's "Rape of Europa," called by many critics the most important picture in America...
Though Berenson, the world's foremost authority on Italian art, directed much of her purchasing, Mrs. Jack was not the kind of women to let her home be furnished by somebody else. Her trips to Europe were among other things, shopping jaunts. Piece by piece, she planned for a new home, a Venetian palace in Boston; by the time she was ready to break ground, she had filled a warehouse with columns, balustrades, gates, pictures, and the like...
When Mrs. Jack was ready, she picked up the belongings from her fashionable home and began building a new home in the wastelands of the Fenway. She had designed a Venetian palace which would house all her works of art in their proper setting. During construction, Mrs. Jack closely supervised every move of the workmen. The walls of the great courtyard look like Italian pink marble because she herself climbed on the scaffolding to show the workmen just how to achieve that effect with pink and white paint. Her personality pervaded every part of the museum, said Carter, her long...