Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) made short work of directing the construction and layout of her world-renowned house museum in Boston, Massachusetts. Work began on Fenway Court (as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was originally known) in 1899, the year after her husband Jack died, and the building was opened to the public in 1903. Before revealing this an overwhelming assemblage of paintings, sculptures, decorative arts and architectural fragments, its creator had nevertheless undertaken a long apprenticeship in the history of world art.
A voracious wanderlust
For about 30 years, Gardner traveled with ambition, beginning in 1867 in hopes of regaining her health after the death of her infant son and ending only with the loss of her husband. The Gardners toured all over Europe, as far as St. Petersburg, along the Nile in 1875, and through Japan, China and India in 1883-84. They visited, given today’s political borders, some 39 countries. She was indeed part of a new generation of great tourists who expanded the boundaries of these cultural expeditions, able to take advantage of colonial infrastructure and administration, but also willing to see the connections between cultures that the colonial mentality has fixed in hygienic silos.
Among the most intimate objects in its museum today are Gardner’s 28 travel albums, which are examined throughout the introduction and five essays in this luxurious publication. The book is edited by Museum curator Isabella Stewart Gardner Diana Greenwald and Minneapolis Institute of Art curator Casey Riley, and accompanies a exhibition of albums at the Gardner (until May 21). It’s oversized, with sample pages from the reproduced albums a little smaller than their actual dimensions and within wide margins in a design that was, perhaps, necessarily on the stark side in order to bring together the bewildering range of visual material.
The albums consist mainly of tourist photographs, sold in hotels, museums and historic sites visited by the Gardners. To these, Isabella added the dates of her arrivals and departures, as well as inscriptions she had jotted down, local proverbs, and the kind of heraldic badges of states and cities that backpackers were used to. collect. Maps, landscapes and buildings in their larger contexts obviously interested him much less, and, as David Odo, research curator at the Harvard Art Museums, notes in his essay here on Japanese material, “the staff seem to be largely absent”.
There are photographs of national costumes in large quantities and examples of the human “types” loved by anthropologists and 19th century postcard publishers. But the albums, whose visual tone has been remarkably consistent over the years, very clearly speak of the extraordinary or the beautiful. thingsbecause even buildings become art for Gardner. Alongside an image of the Anup Talao pavilion in India, she writes that it struck her as “the most gigantic of jewel cases”. If his personality is not immediately evident in the albums, it is gradually inferred through his ostensibly passive eye slowly transforming the world into a pictorial museum, destined eventually to be distilled in the three-dimensional Gardner Museum.
New perspectives
The tests in Wandering Companion are largely concerned with fleshing out the photographic contexts of the albums, for together they represent, after all, the most important example of this modern medium in the collections of the Gardner Museum (all the albums can be studied in detail on the museum’s website ). These experts show that we cannot consider albums to be literally recordings of a collector’s reconnaissance missions. Gardner’s fabulous acquisitions didn’t really begin to sink in until after his inheritance in 1891, when most of his wander were already behind her. The encyclopedic imagery of the albums nevertheless suggests new perspectives for the museum as we see it today. For example, Jaipur is now proposed as being, alongside the more obvious Venice, a source of inspiration for the building’s centerpiece courtyard.
An image of China in 1883
Courtesy of Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
It is striking that the old angry debates about Orientalism have been replaced here by worries about race and difference within the United States itself. Gardner is widely forgiven, with reservations, for being a privileged white globetrotter. But in 1881, she traveled from Chicago by train to Pueblo lands in the southwestern states, part of the touristification of communities there. These images are marked with “A Note on Harmful Content” following a short but powerful text by Jaclyn Roessel, a curator and consultant known for bringing Indigenous perspectives to museums. The book, and its account of Gardner’s world tours, ends with an uncomfortable homecoming.
• Diana Seave Greenwald and Casey Riley (eds) with contributions from Pujan Gandhi, Madeleine Haddon, David Odo, Jaclyn Roessel and Stephanie Tung, Fellow Wanderer: Travel Albums of Isabella Stewart GardnerIsabella Stewart Gardner Museum/Princeton University Press, 244pp, 200 color illustrations, $55/£45 (hb), published April 4, 2023
• Nicolas Tromans is the author of The Private Life of Images: Art at Home in Britain, 1800-1940 (Reaction 2022)
