Museum Publications
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: A Guide
$24.95
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and its magnificent collection are enlivened through fresh insights and new photography in this updated guide.
This updated guide to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum charts new pathways through the beloved institution’s superb collection. Gardner, a trail-blazing American who was among the most prominent patrons of her day, built a Venetian-inspired palazzo in Boston to share her exquisite and thought-provoking art objects from diverse cultures and eras. She hosted luminaries in the worlds of music, dance, and literature, and supported such famed artists as Henry James and John Singer Sargent.
The authors look at masterpieces by Botticelli, Rembrandt, Titian, and others, as well as hidden treasures, including decorative arts, correspondence, and photographs. Rather than positioning the museum simply as a historical gem, they present it as a site for forging connections between past and present and reinforcing the founder’s legacy of sustaining contemporary art, music, and education. Featuring all-new photography, the book captures the uniqueness of this museum, helping us consider anew what the museum meant in Gardner’s time and what it means in ours.
By Dr. Christina M. Nielsen, previous William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (2014-2018), with Casey Riley and Nathaniel Silver, Associate Curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
205 pages
Published by Yale University Press, 2017
Paperback
6.5 x 0.8 x 10 inches
Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life
$24.95
Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) assembled an extraordinary collection of art from diverse cultures and eras—and built a Venetian-style palazzo in Boston to share these exquisite treasures with the world. But her life and work remains shrouded in myth. Separating fiction and fact, this book paints an unforgettable portrait of Gardner, drawing on her substantial personal archive and including previously unpublished findings to offer new perspectives on her life and her construction of identity.
Nathaniel Silver and Diana Seave Greenwald shed new light on Gardner’s connections to minority communities in Boston, her views on suffrage and other issues of the day, the sources of her and her husband’s wealth, and her ties to politicians, writers, and artists. What emerges is a multifaceted portrait of a trailblazing collector and patron of the arts—from Italian Renaissance paintings to Chinese antiquities—who built a museum unprecedented in its curatorial vision.
Beautifully illustrated, this book challenges any portrayal of Gardner as a straightforward feminist hero, revealing instead an exceptional, complex woman who created a legendary museum and played a vibrant and influential role in the art world.
By Nathaniel Silver, former William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Collection, and Diana Seave Greenwald, Assistant Curator of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Collection
112 pages
Published by Princeton University Press, 2022
6.25 x 9.75 in.
Mrs. Jack: A Biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner
$10.95
An in-depth biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner of Boston, via New York, in the 19th century. An American charmer and art collector, Isabella Stewart Gardner and her husband Jack kept company with many leading cultural figures of the day including Henry James, John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler.
By Louise Hall Tharp
408 pages
Reprinted by CS Graphics, 2016
Paperback
8 x 6 inches
Isabella Stewart Gardner, Dog Lover
$19.95
Isabella Stewart Gardner was a force to be reckoned with. She routinely went toe-to-toe with major museums and titans of industry to purchase masterpieces, created a museum unlike any other, and was famous for consistently flouting the social conventions that governed women of her time. However, this book shows another side of Isabella that readers may not expect: her love of dogs.
Richly illustrated with images from the collection and museum archives, this volume allows readers to meet Isabella's favorite dogs (Kitty Wink and Patty Boy), see the litters of puppies she bred, and discover how her dogs were a comfort toward the end of her life. Usually stern in photographs, Isabella - like many people - could not help grinning when posing for photos with puppies. This enthusiasm for dogs is also evident in her correspondence. As she wrote excitedly to her art advisor Bernard Berenson: "Part of my morning's work has been to try to induce two 9 days old fox terrier pups to open their eyes again. They did once; and then clapped them to, with a vim that seemed to say that the box they found themselves in was not the ideal they had come to this world to see!" Even the dogs of celebrities - both celebrities she knew personally, and others she admired from afar - drew her attention. This book also features some of the many photographs she collected of notable people and their dogs, like the painter Anders Zorn and his adorable pup Mouche and Caesar, the regal and loyal terrier who belonged to King Edward VII and even marched in the monarch's funeral parade.
From gathering Renaissance masterpieces to raising Fox Terriers, this book shows that Isabella approached all her tasks with enthusiasm and dedication. By learning about her love of her canine companions, this book presents a more human side of Isabella than typically on display.
Written by Diana Greenwald, Assistant Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
40 pages
Published by Paul Holberton Publishing, 2020
Hardcover
9 x 9 inches
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Daring by Design
$45.00
An in-depth study of one of Boston’s treasured cultural landmarks, the pioneering patron behind the collection, and the Pritzker Prize–winning architect who modernized the Gardner Museum’s vision.
When Isabella Stewart Gardner opened her exquisitely curated collection to the public in 1903, she could hardly have imagined the more than 250,000 visitors that now annually explore the art and furnishings housed in her historic re-creation of a Venetian palace.
Tasked with the first addition to the museum since its founding, Renzo Piano Building Workshop has brought Gardner’s vision into the new millennium. In addition to sumptuous images of the courtyards, gardens, and galleries of the original stone palazzo and rarely seen journal pages and photographs, this beautifully designed volume features architectural renderings and new photographs of the 70,000-square-foot wing.
Essays address Gardner’s life, including her friendships with Henry James, James McNeill Whistler, and John Singer Sargent; the museum’s interaction with Renzo Piano Building Workshop; and the new building within the firm’s distinguished museum work as a whole.
By Anne Hawley, Robert Campbell, and Alexander Wood
160 pages
Published by Skira Rizzoli 2014
Hardcover
9.8 x 1.1 x 11.8 inches
Simone Martini in Orvieto
$45.00
Painter to popes, princes, and scions of Renaissance dynasties, Simone Martini (ca. 1284–1344) transformed Western painting with his groundbreaking devotional images and masterful manipulation of gold. This beautifully illustrated book highlights the astonishing novelty of his paintings in terms of their construction, multimedia techniques, and imagery. A focus of the book—the first on Simone Martini in English in over thirty years—is the work that he produced for churches in the Umbrian city of Orvieto, a papal refuge and stronghold of the Guelph political faction. The publication sheds light on Simone’s early career and technical accomplishments with extended catalogue entries for three Orvieto altarpieces and a painting of private devotion, including the results of new scientific analysis for the Gardner works. Leading scholars consider Simone’s patrons, artistic accomplishments, and contributions to the development of the polyptych altarpiece.
Edited by Nathaniel Silver with contributions by Machtelt Bruggen Israels, Joanna Cannon, Christopher Etheridge, Stephen Gritt
240 pages
Published by Yale University Press, 2022
Hardcover
8.75" x 11.00"
A Bronze Menagerie: Mat Weights of Early China
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The catalog of a special exhibition held at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (October 2006 to January 2007) examining the artistic variety and associations of ancient Chinese mat weights, principally from the Han dynasty.
In 1884, Isabella and Jack Gardner visited China on their journey around the world. For over two months, they toured Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Macau in high colonial style. Isabella kept a diary and compiled an elaborate scrapbook, but collected very little art on her journey. It was not until thirty years later, after she had acquired a vast collection of Western paintings and opened her personal museum in Boston, that she brought her first Chinese antiquities—the two bronze bears from the Han dynasty that inspired this exhibition. A Bronze Menagerie was the first exhibition devoted to ancient Chinese mat weights, a genre of the Warring States Period and Han dynasty. This catalog explores the archaeological and literary evidence for the use of sculptures, discusses the structure of tombs, and investigates the cultural associations of the various animals depicted in the objects.
By Michelle C. Wang, with Guolong Lai, Roel Sterckx, and Eugene Yuejin Wang
136 pages
Published by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Distributed by University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006
Hardcover
10.9 x 8.4 inches
American Victorians and Virgin Nature
$16.00
This volume draws on cultural geography, museology, gender studies, and art history to explore nineteenth-century attitudes towards the American landscape in the broadest sense. The subjects range from the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, and Winslow Homer's illustrations of contemporary women, to dioramas of prehistoric life in the American Museum of Natural History. The "invention" of the Grand Canyon as a tourist destination and even the films of John Ford are used to illustrate the Victorian era's obsessions with nature. These six essays were originally presented at a symposium organized by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
Edited by T. J. Jackson LearsEssays by Richard White, Sarah Burns, Michele Bogart, Elizabeth Johns, Stephen Pyne, and Richard Slotkin
128 pages
Published by Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2002
Paperback
7.5 x 10 inches
Anders Zorn: A European Artist Seduces America
$50.00
This publication re-evaluates the artistic achievements of the Swedish painter Anders Zorn (1860-1920). Bringing his subjects to life with broad brushstrokes, Zorn experimented with different subjects and styles, painting portraits of high society, self-portraits and fellow artists' in their studios, and genre scenes of modern Parisian and rural Swedish life. Moreover, he was crucial in disseminating Swedish art, connecting Scandinavia with Western Europe and with the United States. If we follow the breathless media coverage during Zorn's multiple stays in the States, we might well come to the conclusion that he seduced the nation. America was entirely taken by this "Prince of Art," who exhibited widely, showcasing his sweeping portraits of socialites, unashamed nudes, and brilliant genre scenes.
Zorn's clients in the United States, especially his friendship with Isabella Gardner, forms a major focus of the book. Gardner was one of his most important patrons and a lifelong friend.
This book, based on the exhibition held at the Museum in 2013, illustrates how mutually beneficial and inspiring this relationship was to both Gardner and Zorn. Gardner helped Zorn procure commissions in and outside Boston, and by presenting new archival material, it will become clear just how much Zorn relied on her. The new evidence and interpretations in this book will allow reassessment of Zorn's inspired but often overlooked accomplishments, presenting him instead as an intoxicating artist, someone who is still able to seduce the public.
Edited by Oliver Tostmann
200 pages
Published by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2013
Paperback
9.5 x 0.8 x 11.2 inches
Artists at Court : Image-Making and Identity, 1300-1550
$26.00
Many artists in Renaissance Europe worked for rulers who maintained courts, yet not all of them can be accurately called court artists. The essays featured in Artists at Court explore the experiences and artistic works of artists for whom princely service was a crucial step in their career. The contributors to this volume examine the court artist's working conditions in administrative and ceremonial capacities and how the artists' royal clients may have influenced perceptions of the artist's role and of art itself. They discuss famous artists such as Raphael, Leonardo, Claus Sluter, and Albrecht Dürer, as well as the lesser-known creators of impressive works produced for famous patrons, including the poet Petrarch, the Dukes of Savoy, and the Bentivoglio rulers of Bologna. Their examination raises questions such as How did the artist's terms of employment compare with those of other court functionaries To what extent did court employment correspond with the elevated characterizations of art and artists that began appearing in art treatises by Filarete, Leonardo, and Vasari, among others A fascinating volume that challenges the traditional dichotomy between the alleged freedom of artists working under early capitalism and the supposed subordination of the craftsman working for autocratic rulers, Artists at Court probes the truth behind alternately romantic and oppressed conceptions of the Renaissance artist.
Edited by Stephen J. Campbell268 pages
Published by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2002
Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections
$58.00
Beyond Words accompanies a collaborative exhibition held at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College; Harvard University’s Houghton Library; and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Featuring illuminated manuscripts from nineteen Boston-area institutions, this catalog provides a sweeping overview of the history of the book in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and serves as a guide to their production, illumination, functions, and readership. Entries by eighty-five international experts document, discuss, and reproduce more than two hundred and sixty manuscripts and early printed books, many of them little known before now. Beyond Words also explores the history of collecting such books in Boston, an uncharted chapter in the history of American taste.
Of broad appeal to scholars and amateur enthusiasts alike, this catalog documents one of the most ambitious exhibitions of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts ever to take place in North America.
Edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Lisa Fagin Davis, and Anne-Marie Eze
378 pages
Published by McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2016
Paperback
9 x 1.1 x 12 inches
Bharti Kher: Sketchbooks and Diaries
$36.00
Bharti Kher, 2013 Artist-in-Residence at the Gardner, was enriched and recharged by spending time thinking and living amongst the Museum’s extraordinary building and art treasures.
The focus of this show—on view in the Fenway Gallery from September 20, 2017 to September 10, 2018—is a series of drawings and notebooks Kher made during that time. All the drawings in this artist's book were made by Bharti Kher between 2013 and 2015. The drawings are very tactile, often provocative, and charged with humor and a capriciousness that is smart and mischievous at the same time. They reflect on gender and motherhood, anatomy, and the physiology of pregnancy. They speak of empathy and love while investigating the enigmatic paradoxes and ambiguities of what it means to be human.
By Bharti Kher, edited by Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Diana C Stoll
64 pages
Published by the Corraini Edizioni, 2017
Hardcover
9 x 0.5 x 6 inches
Boston's Apollo: Thomas McKeller & John Singer Sargent
$45.00
Winner of the 2020 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award from
The Art Libraries Society of North America
In 1916, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) met Thomas Eugene McKeller (1890-1962) a young African American elevator attendant at Boston’s Hotel Vendome. McKeller became the principal model for Sargent’s murals in the new wing of the Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, among the painter’s most ambitious works. Sargent’s nude studies and sketches from this project attest to a close collaboration between the two men that unfolded over nearly ten years. Featuring drawings given by Sargent to Isabella Stewart Gardner and published in full for the first time, a portrait of McKeller, and archival materials reconstructing his life and relationship with Sargent, this book opens new avenues into artist-model relationships and transforms our understanding of Sargent’s iconic American paintings. Essays offer the first biography of Thomas McKeller and a window into African American life in early 20th century Roxbury. They address the artist’s sexuality, his models, and consider questions of race and gender.
224 pages
Published by Yale Press, 2020
Hardcover
9 x 12 inches
Botticelli's Witness: Changing Styles in a Changing Florence
$21.95
The life of Sandro Botticelli coincided with the close of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th. This historical moment saw the transition from the rule of the Medici—whose name is synonymous with patronage of the arts—to the fanatical reforms of the Dominican Savonarola.
The catalog that accompanied the exhibition Botticelli's Witness: Changing Styles in a Changing Florence—on view at the Gardner Museum from January 24 to April 6, 1997—features major paintings from all decades of Botticelli's career, along with works by his followers and contemporaries. Within this catalog, three experts explore the relationship between Botticelli's distinct yet changing visual "voice" and the turbulent Florence society of his day.
By Hillard T. Goldfarb, James Hankins, and Laurence Kanter, with preface by former Director Anne Hawley
73 pages
Published by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1997
Paperback
11.5 x 0.4 x 9 inches
Botticelli: Heroines and Heroes
$28.00
Accompanying the exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (February 14 – May 19, 2019), this catalog explores the work of legendary Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli (about 1444–1510). Today the alluring and enigmatic Primavera forms the cornerstone of his modern fame, but its familiarity belies distant origins in the heady intellectual environment of Laurentian Florence and the residences of its moneyed elite. Part of a genre called spalliera, so named for their installation around shoulder (spalla) height, this type of painting introduced beautiful, strange, and disturbing images into lavish Florentine homes. With staggering originality, Botticelli reinvented ancient subjects for the domestic interior, paneling patrician bedrooms with moralizing tales and offering erudite instruction to their influential inhabitants.
At the center of this exhibition is a spalliera reunited, the Gardner’s Tragedy of Lucretia and its companion The Tragedy of Virginia (Accademia Carrara, Bergamo). Together with extraordinary loans of the same genre from European and American public collections, Heroines and Heroes explores Botticelli’s revolutionary approach to antiquity – from ancient Roman to early Christian – and offers a new perspective on his late career masterpieces.
By Nathaniel Silver, Curator of the Collection, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
144 pages
Published by Paul Holberton Publishing, 2019
Paperback
9.5 x 11 inches
Close Up: Bourdichon's Boston Hours
$19.95
This absorbing book explores the crown jewel of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s collection of rare books and manuscripts: Jean Bourdichon’s Boston Hours. As court artist to King François I of France, Bourdichon produced paintings, books and even parade floats for the sovereign and his entourage. This publication accompanies the museum’s first ever exhibition dedicated to this spectacular illuminated manuscript.
Painter to two kings, Jean Bourdichon remains today one of the most celebrated artists of the French Renaissance. By age twenty-four, he was already serving as “peintre du roy,” a title which Bourdichon held for the rest of his life. His illustrious career at the French royal court led to a wide range of commissions—from portraits to wall maps to stained glass—but he is remembered principally for astonishing illuminated manuscripts. The peerless Grandes Heures for Queen Anne of Brittany remains the touchstone of this group which includes some of the most lavishly painted books of hours ever produced.
One of these masterpieces—Bourdichon’s Boston Hours—in the collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is the subject of this book. Bourdichon’s only intact book of hours in the United States was acquired by Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1890 and became the crown jewel of her collection of rare books and manuscripts. Leading scholars Nicholas Herman and Anne-Marie Eze explore its history in depth, shedding new light on the book’s patronage and provenance—from the shelves of a wealthy Catholic landowner in Lincolnshire to the shop of a Venetian art and antiques dealer.
This book is the latest in the Gardner’s Close Up series, each installment focusing on an individual, outstanding work of art in the collection. This publication is the first dedicated to this rare treasure, and precedes an exhibition opening in summer 2022.
64 pages
Published by Paul Holberton Publishing, 2021
Paperback
9.3 x 7.6 inches
Close Up: Piermatteo D'Amelia's Annunciation
$14.95
A new exhibition program, Close Up, features a single work in Isabella Stewart Gardner’s collection. Removed from the historic Palace and displayed in Hostetter Gallery for a short time, it is the subject of lectures, in-gallery presentations and a publication. To inaugurate the exhibition series, we chose a painting close to Isabella’s heart, an altarpiece of The Annunciation by Italian Renaissance painter Piermatteo d’Amelia, traditionally found in our Raphael Room.
While Gardner fell in love with this Annunciation, its history was only revealed after her death. This book recounts three fascinating stories behind this work of art: the riveting tales of its acquisition, its attribution, and its painter. These stories take us back through half a millennium of history, from the false compartment of a smuggler’s trunk on a train bound for Paris to the high altar of a tiny hermitage in rural Italy, with a brief detour to the Sistine Chapel. Like the exhibition, this book offers fresh perspectives on The Annunciation, shedding new light on a familiar masterpiece.
By Nathaniel Silver, Associate Curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
60 pages
Published by Applewood Books, 2016
Paperback
5.5 x 0.2 x 8.2 inches
Close Up: Raphael & The Pope's Librarian
$19.95
Published in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death, this engrossing book accompanies an exhibition the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Raphael and the Pope’s Librarian brings together for the first time one of the most fascinating works in the museum’s collection – the Gardner Museum’s portrait of papal librarian Tommaso Inghirami – and a painting from the Vatican Museums depicting an episode in his life. This book tells the story of the first Raphael in America and explores Inghirami’s fascinating career.
Nearly five centuries after his death in 1520, Raphael’s fame remains undiminished. According to the celebrated writer Henry James, Raphael’s work was “semi-sacred.” Gilded Age American collectors swooned over his iconic religious images. They feverishly tried and failed to acquire Raphael’s rare paintings in a market flooded with copies, and the occasional forgery.
Isabella Stewart Gardner was the first collector to bring a work by Raphael to America, where she named an entire gallery of her new Boston museum after the Renaissance master and installed many of her most celebrated works of art around his portrait of the rotund cleric Tommaso Inghirami.
Raphael and the Pope’s Librarian (October 31, 2019 - January 30, 2020) is part of the Close Up exhibition series, each installment of which sheds new light on an outstanding work of art in the permanent collection.
By Nathaniel Silver and Ingrid Rowland
Close Up: Sargent on Location, Gardner’s First Artist-in-Residence
$19.95
In the winter of 1903, shortly after the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum first opened to the public, John Singer Sargent used the Gothic Room of the museum as a studio. Among the portraits he painted was one of Isabella’s dear friends, Gretchen Osgood Warren. This finely illustrated gem of a publication explores these three remarkable friends: Isabella Stewart Gardner, the museum’s founder and patroness of the arts; John Singer Sargent, premier portrait painter and the museum’s first artist-in-residence; and Gretchen Osgood Warren, a highly accomplished Gilded Age woman.
The collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum includes an astonishing array of objects, including renowned paintings, rare books, sculpture, and decorative arts, as well as more personal items such as collected letters, Isabella’s own correspondence, and ephemera. Mirroring Isabella’s inimitable gallery installations, this publication uses both fine and decorative art, photographs, and correspondence to provide a snapshot in time of the first few years of the museum, in which the collection and its carefully curated spaces inspired new works of art.
As the museum’s first artist-in-residence, Sargent fulfilled Gardner’s hopes for a new kind of cultural institution in Boston, one that would inspire creativity, cultivate artistic talent, and bring joy to artists and amateurs alike. Sargent painted five portraits during his stay at the museum and John Templeman Coolidge, a friend of Gardner’s, captured Sargent at work in the Gothic Room in seven candid photographs. Cigarette in mouth, brush in hand, and a smile on his face, Sargent is seen painting Gretchen Osgood Warren and her daughter who are posing and laughing. This vibrant double portrait stands as a testament to Sargent’s absorption of the museum’s inspirational qualities and his sensitivity to his subject.
Gretchen Osgood Warren was intellectually ambitious and after sitting for her portrait with Sargent, she moved to England with her family and pursued a degree in philosophy and metaphysics at Oxford University. Gardner embraced an increasingly progressive view of women’s rights by the turn of the century and looked approvingly on the educational, political, and professional ambitions of Gretchen Warren’s generation. In Warren, Gardner also discovered a deeply appreciative and sympathetic friend. The eighteen letters between the two women, published here for the first time, illustrate an intimate thirty-five year friendship sharing life’s joys, successes, hardships, and losses.
64 pages
Published by Paul Holberton Publishing, 2018
Paperback
7.5 x 9.5 inches
Composite Landscapes: Photomontage and Landscape Architecture
$60.00
Composite Landscapes examines one of landscape architecture's most recognizable forms: the montage view. The volume gathers work from a select group of contemporary artists and a dozen of the world's leading landscape architects. These composite views reveal practices of photomontage depicting the conceptual, experiential, and temporal dimensions of landscape.
Composite Landscapes illustrates the analog origins of a method now rendered ubiquitous through digital means. In revisiting the composite landscape view as a cultural form, Composite Landscapes illuminates the contemporary status of the photographically constructed image for the design disciplines and beyond.
Edited by Charles Waldheim and Andrea Hansen, with contributions by James S. Ackerman, James Corner, Stephen Daniels, Anette Freytag, Andrea Hansen, Karen M'Closkey, and Charles Waldheim
176 pages
Published by Hatje Cantz, 2014
Hardcover
10 x 1 x 12 inches
Cultural Leadership in America
$24.00
Seven experts discuss the impact of a few important Americans who, through force of personality as well as the nature of their art collecting, helped shape the culture of their times and some of the collections we enjoy today.
In their essays, experts discuss the development of American culture and cultural institutions through the key leadership role of women and other mold-breaking individuals, and present new scholarship on collecting, patronage, philanthropy, and arts management.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
124 pages
Published by the Trustees of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1997
Paperback
7.5 x 0.5 x 10.2 inches
Dennis Miller Bunker and His Circle
$8.00
From the exhibition Dennis Miller Bunker and His Circle, on view from January 13 to June 4, 1995 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The exhibition featured works from the Gardner, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and several private collections.
The essay in this catalog explores Dennis Miller Bunker and the broader crosscurrents of influence in which Bunker participated, as well as his own crucial role as teacher and artistic pioneer. Also included are selected entries from the exhibition, featuring brief commentaries on the works.
By Erica E. Hirshler, with forward by Anne Hawley, former Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
63 pages
Published by the Trustees of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1995
Paperback
10.8 x 0.4 x 10.5 inches
Designing a Garden: Monk's Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
$40.00
Designing a Garden presents Michael Van Valkenburgh’s concept and execution of the Monk’s Garden, an intimate, walled site immediately adjacent to Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Venetian palazzo on the Fenway. Devoted to horticulture and music as well as Old Master paintings and sculpture, Mrs. Gardner planted multiple gardens on the site herself. Van Valkenburgh’s design aims to interpret the museum’s meandering gallery layout, and the rich colors and textures of its idiosyncratic collection, in a contemporary landscape context.
A small-scale, dreamlike woodland, the garden is composed of approximately sixty trees including Stewartia, paperbark maple, and gray birch, that establish a detail-rich palette of colors and textures suitable for intimate appreciation. Winding paths, paved in a striking combination of black brick and reflective mica schist, meander through the trees in the Olmstedian tradition that invites a gentle pace and contemplation.
Van Valkenburgh’s text explores the origins of his love of landscape and plants in his family farm in Upstate New York and moves through the designing of the Monk’s Garden, focusing on the experiential nature of the process and the challenges and satisfactions of the small scale and the historic and cultural context.
By Michael Van Valkenburgh
208 pages
Published by The Monacelli Press, 2019
Hardcover
7.5 x 9.5 inches
Donatello, Michelangelo, Cellini: Sculptors' Drawings from Renaissance Italy
$50.00
The self-portrait of Baccio Bandinelli in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum shows the sculptor pointing not to a work of marble or bronze, but to a drawing. Bandinelli was particularly proud of his skills as a draftsman, and he was prolific in his production of works on paper. This set him apart from contemporaries in his profession; many Renaissance sculptors left us no drawings at all.
This publication puts Bandinelli’s portrait in context by looking at the practice of drawing by sculptors from the Renaissance to the Baroque in Central Italy. A focus of the book will be Bandinelli’s own drawings and the development of his practice across his career and his experimentation with different media. Bandinelli’s drawings will be compared with those of Michelangelo and Cellini. The broader question considered, however, is when, how and why sculptors drew. Every Renaissance sculptor who set out to make a work in metal or stone would first have made a series of preparatory models in wax, clay and/or stucco. Drawing was not an essential practice for sculptors in the way it was for painters, and indeed, most surviving sculptors’ drawings are not preparatory studies for works they subsequently executed in three dimensions. By comparing both rough sketches and more finished drawings with related three-dimensional works by the same artists, the importance of drawing for various individual sculptors will be examined. When sculptors did draw, it often indicated something about the artist’s training or about his ambitions. Beginning with a chapter dedicated to the importance of draftsmanship in the education of sculptors, showing works by Finiguerra, Cellini Bandinelli and Giambologna, the book will be split up into chapters dealing with the various challenges sculptors faced while drawing objects in the round, reliefs, and architectural structures. A central section will focus on Bandinelli, demonstrating the importance drawing held for him while he was preparing sculptures and as an independent token of his artistry.
This exhibition catalog features full color reproduction of images seen in the newest exhibit at the Gardner Museum. Text from our curators creates a rich history and context that will enlighten readers of the fundamental questioning that sparked the endeavor of this exhibit.
Edited by Michael W. Cole
256 pages
Published by Paul Holberton Publishing, 2014
Paperback
9.8 x 1 x 11 inches
Fra Angelico: Heaven on Earth
$55.00
Accompanying the exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, this catalog explores one of the most important artists of the Renaissance. Fra Angelico (about 1395–1455) transformed Western art with pioneering images, rethinking popular compositions and investing traditional Christian subjects with new meaning. His altarpieces and frescoes set new standards for quality and ingenuity, securing his place in history. With the intellect of a Dominican theologian, the technical facility of Florence’s finest craftsmen and the business acumen of its shrewdest merchants, he forged the future of painting in Italy and beyond.
The exhibition reunites for the first time Fra Angelico’s four reliquaries for Santa Maria Novella (1424-1434; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Museo di San Marco, Florence). Together they cover key episodes in the life of the Virgin Mary and capture in miniature some of his most important compositional innovations. Assembled at the Gardner with exceptional examples of Angelico’s narrative paintings from collections in Europe and the United States, Heaven on Earth explores his celebrated talents as a storyteller and the artistic contributions that shaped a new ideal of painting in Florence.
250 pages, 125 color illustrations
Published by Paul Holberton, 2018
Hardcover or Paperback
11.5 x 1 x 10 inches
Furnishing a Museum: Isabella Stewart Gardner's Collection of Italian Furniture
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Best known for its collection of masterpiece paintings, the Gardner Museum is also one of the first museums to include a large quantity of Italian furniture. Ranging from Renaissance wedding chests and inlaid credenza to Rococo Venetian pieces of the 18th century, the collection is perhaps the largest of its type in the United States. Although relying upon several advisers for her acquisitions of paintings and sculptures (most famously, Bernard Berenson), Isabella Gardner bought her furniture entirely on her own, recognizing the critical role furniture played in the function and decoration of Italian interiors from the 15th century to the early 19th century. This meticulously designed catalog includes numerous photographs that focus on individual objects and reveal characteristic forms and styles. Observations made by the museum conversation department about the techniques and materials of the pieces, which differ significantly from furniture of other countries, are also published. Long overlooked, very little has appeared in English on the subject of Italian furniture. Yet, these magnificent objects are finally given the careful study and attention they deserve in this beautifully produced catalog.
By Fausto Calderai and Alan Chong
328 pages
Published by Periscope, 2011
Hardcover
9.5 x 1.2 x 12 inches
Henry James and American Painting
$27.00
From the eponymous young sculptor in Roderick Hudson to vital scenes in the crowded galleries of The Wings of the Dove, Henry James’s iconic novels reflect the significance of the visual culture of his society. In this edifying volume, novelist and critic Colm Tóibín joins art historian Marc Simpson and Declan Kiely of the Morgan Library & Museum to reveal how essential the language and imagery of the arts—and friendships with artists—were to James’s writing.
The authors consider the paintings, photographs, drawings, and sculpture produced by artists in James’s circle, assess how his pictorial aesthetic developed, and discuss why he destroyed so many personal documents and what became of those that survived. In examining works by figures such as John La Farge, Hendrik Andersen, and John Singer Sargent alongside selections from James’s novels, personal letters, and travel writings, Tóibín, Simpson, and Kiely explore the artistic and social milieu in which James lived and out of which he created his fiction. They also show him to be a writer with a painterly eye for colors and textures, shapes, and tastes, and for the blending of physical and psychological impressions. In many cases, the characters populating James’s fiction are ciphers for his artist friends, whose demeanor and experiences inspired James to immortalize them on the page. He also wrote critically about art, most notably the work of his friend John Singer Sargent.
A refreshing new perspective on the work of a master novelist who was greatly nourished by his friendships with artists, Henry James and American Painting reveals a James whose literary imagination seemed most at ease with the image, the nuance of light and shade, and the artistry of creating fully realized portraits of his characters.
By Colm Tóibín, Marc Simpson, and Declan Kiely
204 pages
Published by Penn State University Press, 2017
Hardcover
8 x 0.8 x 10 inches
In The Company of Artists
$36.00
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's Artist-In-Residence Program is one of the oldest in the country, arguably beginning in the early days of the Museum when Gardner's friend John Singer Sargent stated in an apartment on the ground floor, using a room on the third floor as a studio.
In 1992, the Museum began inviting artists to once again stay on the premises and respond to the collection, offering fresh perspectives to Gardner's creation. This book reflects on the AIR Program from its inception until today, revealing the surprising insights and discoveries that arise when contemporary artists are given space and time to research and develop new work in an extraordinary setting.
Our esteemed Artists-in-Residence:
Hamra Abbas • Lida Abdul • Heather Ackroyd / Dan Harvey • Andrea Anastasio • Laura Anderson Barbata • Stefano Arienti • Nancy Aronie • Joan Bankemper • Alessandro Baricco • Paul Beatty • Natasha de Betak • Manfred Bischoff • Ashley Bryan • Ambreen Butt • Maurizio Cannavacciuolo • Jason Cheriyan • Dorit Cypis • Edwidge Danticat • Constance DeJong • Jeremy Denk • Marty Ehrlich • Martín Espada • Cliff Evans • Heide Fasnacht • Lara Favaretto • Moritz Fehr • Carla Fernández • Vadim Fishkin • Ivana Franke • Ken Frazelle • Henrik Håkansson • Stefon Harris • Mona Higuchi • Susan Howe • Abdullah Ibrahim • Michele Iodice • Jyotindra Jain • Joan Jonas • Bharti Kher • Joseph Kosuth • Luisa Lambri • Ann Lauterbach • Ledoh • Laura Lima • Lee Mingwei • Liz Lerman • Steve Locke • David Ludwig • Barbara Lynch • Gregory Maguire • Denise Marika • Walter Mayes • Josiah McElheny • Todd McKie • Gcina Mhlophe • Helen Mirra • Abelardo Morell • Alicia Hall Moran • Victoria Morton • Melvin Moti • Juan Muñoz • Anne Nivat • Jay O’Callahan • Luigi Ontani • OpenEnded Group • Jean-Michel Othoniel • Laura Owens • Olivia Parker • Zhang Peili • Adam Pendleton • Rachel Perry • Cesare Pietroiusti • Ana Prvački • Luisa Rabbia • Raqs Media Collective • Elaine Reichek • Paula Robison • Barry Schwabsky • Taro Shinoda • Michael Singer • Dayanita
Singh • Zoe Strauss • Elizabeth Swados • Jennifer Tipton • Su-Mei Tse • Nari Ward • Charmaine Wheatley • David Wilson • Serra Yilmaz • Nevet Yitzhak • Jessica Yu • Danijel Žeželj
346 pages
Published by Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2019
Hardcover
10 x 7 x 1.5 inches
Joan Jonas: I Know Why They Left
$28.00
Joan Jonas: I Know Why They Left, printed in conjunction with the 2019 exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, is an artist’s book featuring full-color reproductions of a new series of drawings by this seminal artist. As an Artist-in-Residence in 2017, Jonas was drawn to the vast array of mythical and archetypal animals present in the Gardner’s collection. Drawn from objects made of lace, stone, metal, wood, and ceramic, or found in tapestries and paintings, the animal figures allude to the importance of nature’s life force in the face of disruptive human presence. In this book, which includes a conversation between Joan Jonas and Pieranna Cavalchini, Jonas’s ability to conjure wonder, fear, and humor through poetic imagery continues to work its magic.
Joan Jonas (b. 1936, USA) is the recipient of numerous fellowships, honors, and awards. She received her B.A. in Art History from Mount Holyoke College, studied sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and received her M.F.A. in sculpture from Columbia University. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Jonas was active in the New York art scene, mingling with Nancy Holt, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, and Robert Whitman; dancers and choreographers Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, and Trisha Brown; and composers and musicians John Cage, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and La Monte Young. Exposure to these various disciplines fed into the layering of art forms in her own work. Jonas began teaching at MIT in 1998 and is currently Professor Emerita at the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology with the School of Architecture and Planning.
By Pieranna Cavalchini, the Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art, in collaboration with artist Joan Jonas
96 pages
Published by Corraini, 2019
Hardcover
8 x 8 inches
Joseph Kosuth: Guide to Contemporary Art, Special Edition
$18.00
A pioneer of the conceptual art movement, Joseph Kosuth's work explores the role of meaning in art and, like an archeologist of language and culture, he orders words and ideas from our historical memory into distinct yet intersecting layers of cultural activity--ones that are experienced today. For his 2003 exhibition celebrating the Museum's Centennial Year, Kosuth used a variety of media--text, photographs, neon signage, archival materials, objects from the This Special Edition Guide blends the Museum's guide to the collection with documentation of Kosuth's installations throughout the galleries and on the exterior façade and three site-specific installations Kosuth set up as an open-ended dialogue between James McNeil Whistler, Bernard Berenson, and Gardner herself.
Edited by Fiona Biggiero184 pages
Published by Charta, 2004
Hardcover
6 x 9 inches
Josiah McElheny: The Story of Glass
$15.00
Josiah McElheny creates finely crafted, handmade glass objects that he combines with photographs, text, and museological displays to evoke notions of meaning and memory.
This book, produced in conjunction with McElheny's 1999 exhibition The Story of Glass, presents a survey of his career as well as the new work he produced while an Artist-in-Residence at the Gardner. Essays by cultural historian Dave Hickey and Jennifer Gross explore the intersection of history and contemporary experience presented in McElheny's work.
By Josiah McElheny, with Dave Hickey and Jennifer R Gross
65 pages
Published by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1999
Paperback
9.8 x 0.2 x 9.5 inches
Lee Mingwei: The Living Room
$12.00
Lee Mingwei's simple yet elegant installations provide a stage for interpersonal exchange around ordinary human events or activities–admiring an object, making conversation, or writing a letter to a friend or family member.
His installations such as The Dining Project and The Letter-Writing Project are explored along with a project developed while an artist-in-residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum called The Living Room. This installation creates a modern-day version of the salon life which the museum's founder used to enliven her collection. The publication includes essays by Jennifer Gross and Lewis Hyde.
By Lee Mingwei, Jennifer R. Gross, and Lewis Hyde, with an introduction by Anne Hawley
60 pages
Published by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2000
Hardcover
10 x 0.2 x 10 inches
Lee Mingwei: Trilogy of Sound
$22.00
Lee Mingwei, an artist who focuses on installations that often require outsider participation to be complete, was born in Taiwan and is currently based in New York City.
His Trilogy of Sounds is a sound installation that uses perception of nature and sound within the house and gardens of Mount Stuart to create always changing sequences. Instead of focusing on the well known, monumental aspects of Mount Stuart, Lee Mingwei highlights the sounds and sights of small details: the wind, birds, trees, echoes.
By Lee Mingwei
21 pages
Published by the Mount Stuart Trust, 2010
Paperback
6.7 x 0.2 x 9.6 inches
Life, Death & Revelry: The Farnese Sarcophagus
$21.95
In terms of antiquarian fame, the Farnese Sarcophagus – elaborately carved with satyrs and maenads gathering grapes – may be the most important work of art in the Gardner collection, and perhaps of its type in America. A large, rectangular coffin of Pentelic marble, the Farnese Sarcophagus was exported from Athens to the area of Rome in the late Severan period, between c. 222 and 235 AD. The carving of the satyrs and maenads was especially suited to the artistic tastes of Mannerist and Baroque Rome, providing one of the most elegant examples of Greek imperial optic elongation to have survived from ancient times.
Life, Death & Revelry will offer a multi-disciplinary, multi-era look at this important monument. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, it will bring together archaeological analyses of the piece and its previous restorations, and numerous Renaissance prints and drawings depicting the sarcophagus during its time in Rome.
Dr. Christina Nielsen, previous William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (2014-2018)
250 pages
Published by Paul Holberton Publishing, 2018
Paperback
9.4 x 11 inches
Luisa Lambri: Portrait
$50.00
Known for her photographic meditations on architecture, artist Luisa Lambri offers an innovative understanding of the mind and character of collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. Designed in collaboration with the artist, Portrait features a selection of Lambri's lyrical photographic studies of the Museum's unique spaces, a body of work that functions metaphorically as both a portrait of the artist and a portrait of Gardner.
Also included are extended excerpts from the diary of the Museum's architect, Willard T. Sears, during the time of the Museum's construction as well as an essay on Lambri's residency at the Gardner by curator Pieranna Cavalchini. Published on the occasion of the reopening of the Museum in January 2012, this book provides new insights into Isabella Stewart Gardner—whose driving vision brought the museum to life—and a profound investigation into the poetics of place.
By Luisa Lambri, with Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Amanda Esteves-Kraus
93 pages
Published by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2012
Hardcover
10.1 x 0.3 x 7.8 inches
Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella
$25.00
Turin-born, Brooklyn-based Luisa Rabbia produced this delightful book of collage--inspired by archival photographs purchased by Isabella Stewart Gardner from local photographers while traveling through China in 1883--during her residency at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Rabbia manipulates the photographs with drawings made via digital projection.
Written by Pieranna Cavalchini96 pages
Published by Charta, 2009
Hardcover
9.5 x 6 inches
Luxury for Export: Artistic Exchange Between India and Portugal Around 1600
$24.00
Portugal established trading centers in India and Sri Lanka through the first direct sea route from Europe to Asia. By the 1500s, the luxury goods being imported from South Asia were highly sought after, creating an evolving trade system that resulted in the development of art and craft work that combined styles and traditions.
This catalog identifies these important works that show the artistic collaboration between vastly different cultures.
By Pedro Moura Carvalho
77 pages
Published by Periscope Publishing Ltd., 2008
Hardcover
8.2 x 0.8 x 11.5 inches
Maurizio Cannavacciuolo: TV Dinner
$18.00
TV Dinner documents an important installation at the Museum by Maurizio Cannavacciuolo. The Italian artist's first museum exhibition in the U.S., "TV Dinner" is an intricately patterned site-specific wall drawing, executed in two parts, which contains hidden narratives about the Museum's collection and legendary founder as well as elements characteristic of Cannavacciuolo personal myths and low-key humor. This book documents the five-month installation and surveys Cannavacciuolo's earlier works. Essays include an examination of the process by which Cannavacciuolo created this monumental yet ephemeral work by Pieranna Cavalchini and a consideration of his wider oeuvre with particular attention to the role of performance and pattering in his art by Marcia E. Vetrocq.
By Maurizio Cannavacciuolo96 pages
Published by Charta, 2004
Hardcover
6.92 x 9.68 inches
Melvin Moti: Collector's Item
$18.00
This one-off magazine was conceptualized and designed by Dutch artist Melvin Moti (Artist-in-Residence 2010), with additional contributions by artists Runa Islam and Douglas Ross.
Moti believes that collectors such as Isabella Stewart Gardner inspire us to become collectors. "We are looking through the eyes of the collector when we follow the very spontaneous yet sensitive connections between all the collected objects," Moti says. "The collector is materialized through the visitor, who becomes another component of the scripted orchestration of the collection."
The magazine includes texts, drawings, and photography by the three artists, and investigates the extent to which the Gardner Museum's conceptual approach can be found in other museums. Douglas Ross points to the very dominant presence of the collector and complex instructions for displaying the collection as characteristics shared by the Gardner Museum and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. The unusual transformation from a private collection to a public museum is the central focus of Runa Islam's project on the Sir John Soane Museum in London.
By Melvin Moti with Douglas Ross and Runa Islam
21 pages
Published by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2012
8 x 0.3 x 7.25 inches
Paperback
Mona Higuchi: Bamboo Echoes
$18.00
Born of Japanese and Korean descent, Mona Higuchi is an American artist whose work speaks quietly of dislocation, identity and history.
Her 1996 exhibition, Bamboo Echoes: A New Work by Mona Higuchi Dedicated to the Comfort Woman, blended Higuchi's research on both Isabella Stewart Gardner's Second Chinese Room, which was dismantled in the 1970s, and the Korean Comfort Woman who were forced by the Japanese army into sexual slavery during World War II. The installation drew its viewers in to the gallery through a narrow doorway of form, shape and light. Once there, they began a quiet journey as silent histories were revealed.
This catalog documents Higuchi's work and poignant installation. It includes texts by curator Jill Medvedow and Alice Yun Hai, a leading expert on the history of the Comfort Women.
Organized by Jill S. Medvedow
26 pages
Published by the Trustees of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1996
Paperback
8.5 x 7.5 inches
© 2022 Gift at the Gardner.
