Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Categories: Museums, Art Galleries
7/4/2009 5 photos
For many of us, the closest we will ever get to being inside an Italian Renaissance palazzo will be the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, with the unworldly beauty of its inner courtyard, fin-de-siecle ambiance (Whistler, Sargent, Berenson), and both quality and breadth of its collection of European painting.

The building's facade itself is relatively nondescript, but at least the contrast between the architecture and the collection is not as harsh, let's say, as that of the National Gallery in D.C.

Even shorn of its Rembrandt and Vermeer (from the 1990 heist), the Gardner is peerless if only due to the its similitude to an actual residence rather than an "institution," which will change with the advent of a new building addition by Renzo Piano in 2010.

The first Titian I ever saw was here--the famed "{Rape of] Europa," of which I had seen countless reproductions in books before. The scene--a close-up of Europa supine on the back of an enormous bull--was bathed in the most sublime Venetian colors--sapphire blue, rosy salmon, fleecy whites, and warm orange, and lagoon-deep greens.

Tucked away along one wall (in the "Spanish cloister") was Sargent's "El Jaleo," with its sulfurous dramatic intensity , stark chiaroscuro, reduced palette, and virtuoso brushwork.

And not far away, in the spirit of harmonious eclecticism, a Song dynasty wood Guanyin, the bodhisatta (also known in China as the "goddess of mercy").

With a strong whiff of Orientalism, Whistler's impressionistic "Nocturne in Blue and Silver/Battersea Ranch," hangs in the Yellow Room on the first floor.

Definitely worth a trip to again on my next visit to Boston. (On the West Coast, where I live, anything pre-World War II is considered ancient).

A list of artists and their works at the Gardner:
http://www.gardnermuse...