Letters to Isabella Stewart Gardner

By Henry James, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi

Steerforth Press

Copyright © 2009 Pushkin Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-901285-83-3

Contents

Introduction by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, 9,
Editor’s Note, 27,
Henry James, Mrs Gardner and Art by Alan Chong, 31,
Letters by Henry James, 47,
Bibliography, 313,
Acknowledgements, 333,
Photographic Credits, 335,

CHAPTER 1

HENRY JAMES, MRS GARDNER AND ART

Henry James and Isabella Gardner were bound together in innumerable ways — by a shared social circle stretching from Boston to London and Venice, a love of theatre and music, an interest in gossip and a devotion to attractive young men. And they were both devoted to Italy, Venice especially. But most profoundly, they both loved art. This passion is not well illuminated in their surviving correspondence, leaving us to speculate on their discussions and to consider their common modes of thinking, conducted in very different ways and often from afar.

In one of James’s earliest letters to Gardner (2 of 1879), he provided her with the address of the painter Edward Burne-Jones and a recommendation: “his things are very interesting (I think, at least)”. And in a review from about the same time, James singled out the artist for praise. We do not know if Isabella actually visited the artist, but she bought nothing by him. Indeed at this time, Isabella could hardly be called a collector at all. She owned, by this date, paintings by Charles-Émile Jacque and Narcisse-Virgile Diaz, and at this early period bought modest works from local Boston galleries — furnishings common in American upper-class residences.

Henry James, however, was intimately familiar with the contemporary art scene, in part through the many reviews he was writing in the 1870s. He played a crucial role in introducing Isabella to the lively world of art exhibitions in London and Paris in 1879 and through the 1880s. More important, James introduced Isabella to artists, and from this point in time, she surrounded herself with artists, socialized with them, befriended them and bought work directly from them. Indeed, James can be credited with initiating what would become an all-consuming passion for Isabella.

Burne-Jones’s address was just one of many such introductions. An especially important event was a party at the Grosvenor Gallery on 21st July 1879, when Isabella first met James McNeill Whistler. The gallery’s third summer exhibition included works by Whistler. Henry James, Henry Adams, and Jack and Isabella all went to the reception. In September of the same year James accompanied the Gardners to Paris.

Isabella and James had very different opinions of Whistler’s work, one of many examples where their taste diverged. In 1878, James described the Ruskin-Whistler trial, and characterized Whistler’s work: “Unfortunately, Mr. Whistler’s productions are so very eccentric and imperfect (I speak here of his paintings only; his etchings are quite another affair, and altogether admirable) …” Isabella was much more enthusiastic. In October 1886, she bought a small painting and two pastels, including a portrait of herself. In the 1890s, she acquired numerous etchings as well as two landscape paintings. In the mid-1890s there was even discussion of her acquiring Whistler’s famous Peacock Room for the Boston Public Library, although nothing came of the idea.

Henry James’s most significant act of mediation was introducing Isabella to John Sargent in 1886. Sargent’s Madame X (Metropolitan Museum of Art) had taken Paris by storm, and James arranged a private viewing of the scandalous portrait in the privacy of the artist’s studio (letter 31). Enthusiastic about Sargent’s painting, James had quickly befriended the artist. In 1887, James published an insightful appraisal of Sargent’s work in Harper’s Magazine where he commented on Madame X as well as on paintings that had made their way to Boston, including the Portrait of the Boit Children (Museum of Fine Arts) and El Jaleo (now in the Gardner Museum). Isabella would undoubtedly have met Sargent with or without James, especially since the artist came to Boston in 1887 to paint society portraits of many of Isabella’s friends. But her enthusiasm was certainly stoked by James, who made sure that she was familiar with the range of Sargent’s work. Indeed the novelist seems to have guided her approach to working artists. In Boston, Sargent painted a remarkable portrait of Mrs Gardner, but its unusual pose and background are as much her creation as his. She clearly desired a portrait that would make a splash — that would seem unique, if not actually as controversial as the sensuous display of flesh in Madame X. James described Sargent’s portrait of Isabella without having seen it, calling it (appropriately) a “Byzantine Madonna with a halo”.

But even with Sargent, James and Gardner parted ways. El Jaleo, exhibited at the Salon of 1882, was not to James’s liking:

It looks like life, but it looks also, to my view, rather like a perversion of life, and has the quality of an enormous ‘note’ or memorandum, rather than of a representation … “El Jaleo’ sins, in my opinion, in the direction of ugliness and, independently of the fact that the heroine is circling round incommoded by her petticoats, has a want of serenity.

Isabella could not have disagreed more. The painting had been purchased by a relative of Jack Gardner’s, T Jefferson Coolidge, who brought it to Boston. Isabella craved it, apparently for decades; in 1914, she created an entire gallery to display El Jaleo in an evocative manner, and she succeeded in obtaining the painting as a gift.

Isabella Gardner in turn seems to have inspired Henry James — she can perhaps be glimpsed in various characters, although the connection is always obtuse and based on transformed details of personality and habit. James’s notebooks explicitly record Isabella, not always in a flattering way. In 1895, struck by the “insane frenzy of futile occupation imposed by the London seasons”, he imagined a character based on Isabella — “the age of Mrs Jack, the figure of Mrs Jack”. Did James associate Gardner with activity lacking serious thought? On other occasions James marvelled at her energy — in 1892 she acquired chairs from the Borghese collection: “The little lady is of an energy! She showed me yesterday at Carrer’s her seven glorious chairs (the loveliest I ever saw); but they are not a symbol of her attitude — she never sits down.”

The same year in Venice, Gardner commissioned portraits of herself and Jack from the Viennese artist, Ludwig Passim. Katharine Bronson gave a large dinner party for the Gardners, and James had the opportunity to talk to Passim. The artist remarked that the Empress Frederick of Germany knew exactly how to pose for a portrait, and James conceived the idea that since aristocrats had posed for artists their entire lives, even deposed royalty would never lose that particular skill. The story has a cruel edge to it since Passini’s portrait of Isabella is awkward in the extreme, and James must have been struck by Isabella’s failure to pose well for a portrait. Passini’s portrait does not survive and may have been destroyed by Isabella.

James understood Isabella’s desire to collect, and to create a public museum that would reflect her personality. Indeed, he seems to have come to this realization after spending extended periods with her at the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice. He wrote to her in 1893 (letter 56) saying that he imagined her at the Chicago World’s Fair with her own building, “an infinitely more barbarous Barbaro — all to yourself … in a category by itself, Mrs Jack’s building?” He wished for his own apartment at the top, like the bed he had in the Palazzo Barbaro’s library.

This is a joke, of course, but a prophetic one. James had detected in Isabella’s energy and ambition the possibility of some kind of Venetian construction devoted to art — a vision encouraged by her enthusiastic first steps as a collector.

Isabella and James did not see much of each other or correspond in the period when she was building and installing her new museum in Boston, so consumed was she with its preparation prior to its opening in January 1903. In 1904, James returned to America after an absence of twenty-one years, and saw Fenway Court for the first time.

James went on drives and spent time with Isabella at Green Hill, where he met her new friend Okakura Kakuzo, the author of The Book of Tea. In his notebook, he recalled his time “with Mrs Gardner (ah, to squeeze a little, a little of what I felt, out of that, too!) at Brookline, at her really so quite picturable Green Hill — which would yield a ‘vignette,’ I think, whereof I fully possess all the elements”.

In The American Scene, his look at his native country, published in 1907, James attempted to place Isabella’s new museum within the Bostonian as well as American tradition of the arts. He applauded the “rare exhibition of the living spirit lately achieved, in the interest of the fine arts, and of all that is noblest in them, by the unaided and quite heroic genius of a private citizen”. He meant, of course, Isabella, and he contrasted her efforts, somewhat surprisingly, with the aggressive philanthropy found in the foundation or expansion of universities, which constructed vast empty facilities waiting to be used. Rather, he celebrated Isabella’s passionate love of art — and the idea of presenting it to the public:

To attempt to tell the story of the wonderfully-gathered and splendidly-lodged Gardner Collection would be to displace a little the line that separates private from public property; and yet to find no discreet word for it is to appear to fail of feeling for the complexity of conditions amid which so undaunted a devotion to a great idea (undaunted by the battle to fight, losing, alas, with State Protection of native art, and with other scarce less uncanny things) has been able consummately to flower. It is in presence of the results magnificently attained, the energy triumphant over everything, that one feels the fine old disinterested tradition of Boston least broken.

However, James says nothing about the particular character of the art and installation of Fenway Court. On a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, then still at Copley Square (the new building would open in 1909), he was taken by a small sculpture of Aphrodite. So charged was this delicate work, that it seemed to change its surrounding, even to “make a garden”.

I felt this quarter of the Boston Art Museum bloom, under the indescribable dim eyes, with delicate flowers. The impression swallowed up every other; the place, whatever it was, was supremely justified, and I was left cold by learning that a much bigger and grander and richer place is presently to overtop it.

James also noted that objects of importance were usually condemned to cold and antiseptic surroundings: “objects doomed to distinction make round them a desert”. Isabella’s museum, like portions of the old Museum of Fine Arts, was an antidote to this approach. James instinctively shared with Isabella an understanding that art needed to be seen in a rich setting. He had seen the cold new facilities of the universities and feared the construction of the new Museum of Fine Arts building. It therefore seems that ancient Aphrodite in the Museum of Fine Arts is actually a surrogate for Isabella Gardner’s museum, in particular as he imagines a garden around the sculpture. In fact, at the heart of Fenway Court lay a real garden adorned with ancient sculpture.

Isabella never spelt out her museological philosophy, but her circle of friends formulated many of its principles. Matthew Prichard, the assistant to the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, and a close friend of Isabella’s, tried to explain the unique environment of Fenway Court. In an essay of 1911, he attempted to describe the evocative powers of the place:

You visit a lady of feeling. She receives you in a room hung with tapestry; someone is playing on the piano; your friend is charmingly dressed and she wears jewellery; there are flowers about. You sit down and talk with her … you were aware of the various elements affectingyou during the call, the music, the flowers, the dress and so on, but you did not examine them … you did not conceptualize them. It appeared all as one harmony … Do you not think that such an experience may be typical of what we call art?

In this view, the Gardner Museum’s multisensory experience prevented visitors from analysing individual objects in an intellectual fashion. This is remarkably close to James’s contrast of two modes of looking — he starts as the “restless analyst” but gives way to the emotion of the “sonneteer”. Prichard and others in Isabella’s circle such as the painter John La Farge also attacked an overly analytical and academic approach to art. La Farge likened her museum to poetry: its collection “is but the necessary filling in of a manner of poem, woven into the shape of a house by a mind recalling likings and the memories of the past, and so much of a creation that the mistress’ own hand has mixed the very tones that colour the walls, chamfered the beams of the ceilings, as well as planned the scheme and disposal of the entire building”.

Isabella Gardner purposefully avoided interpretive or philosophical statements, which suggests that she regarded the meaning of Fenway Court as unfixed. The personal combinations of paintings, furniture and sculpture might evoke particular meanings and associations, but the visitor is entirely free to experience art emotionally and to construct meanings indirectly This absence of a single authoritative reading can be likened to the shifting points of view encountered in James’s late novels. As Isabella was conceiving her museum in the period 1899 to 1902, James was developing an innovative narrative technique that allowed the reader to follow the thoughts of various characters in succession. For example, events in The Wings of the Dove, published in 1902, unfold from the point of view of several different individuals.

In the novel, Milly Theale, a dying young American heiress, rents an art-filled palace on the Grand Canal in Venice in which to spend her final days, sheltered from the quotidian world. James himself said that Milly was partly based on his beloved cousin Minny Temple, who had died from tuberculosis, but the character also resembles Isabella Gardner. Both always wore long strings of pearls and, more significant, like Milly Theale, Isabella regularly rented a palace in Venice — the Palazzo Barbaro, which inspired both her and James.

Hung about with pictures and relics, the rich revered and served … Milly moved slowly to and fro as the priestess of the worship. Certainly it came from the sweet taste of solitude, caught again and cherished for the hour; always a need of her nature, moreover, when things spoke to her with penetration. It was mostly in stillness they spoke to her best; amid voices she lost the sense.

There is no doubt that the setting for The Wings of the Dove was the Palazzo Barbaro, since its owners were described as a kindly American couple — in real life, Daniel and Ariana Curtis. And for the New York Edition of his oeuvre, James sent Alvin Coburn to photograph the palazzo for the frontispiece. But more important, James characterized the novel’s palace as an ideal museum — when bad weather forced Merton Densher to remain in the palace, the day “had passed for him like a series of hours in a museum, though without the fatigue of that; and it had also resembled something that he was still, with a stirred imagination, to find a name for”.

Henry James’s brother, William, was bothered by the shifting perspective and willful obscurity of The Wings of the Dove. He complained to the novelist: “You’ve reversed every traditional canon of storytelling (especially the fundamental one of telling the story, wh. you carefully avoid).” This narrative imprecision — “the complication of innuendo and associative reference” — characterizes both the novel and Isabella Gardner’s palace. Crucial conversations and plot developments are only hinted at in the novel, a practice paralleled in Gardner’s suggestive, non-expository museum. Both novel and museum entice their audiences into creating their own readings.

The palace in The Wings of the Dove functions as an escape from time, from the frivolous and commercial world, but also, for Milly Theale, from death. Like Fenway Court, the structure is filled with beautiful objects and seems to belong to no particular point in time. James wrote: “she insisted that her palace — with all its romance and art and history — had set up round her a whirlwind of suggestion that never dropped for an hour. It wasn’t therefore, within such walls, confinement, it was the freedom of all the centuries.” The poetic imprecision of this language — romance and suggestion, art and history — is far removed from that of the critic or the art historian, but much closer to the spirit of Fenway Court, especially as articulated by Prichard and La Farge. Henry James and Isabella Gardner worked in parallel, sharing an approach, and dipping into the common repository of ideas. Like James, Isabella left her audience with a variety of narrative possibilities and sensory experiences, rather than specific encodings of meaning. Often caricatured as embodiments of a tradition-bound, old World elite, Isabella Gardner and Henry James, in their respective fields, now seem surprisingly modern.

ALAN CHONG

(Continues…)Excerpted from Letters to Isabella Stewart Gardner by Henry James, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi. Copyright © 2009 Pushkin Press. Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
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