Museum Publications
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: A Guide
$24.95
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 Nathaniel Silver, previous William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (2018-2022), and Casey Riley, former Curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
205 pages
Published by Yale University Press, 2017
Paperback
Measures 6.5" x 0.8" x 10"
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book paints an unforgettable portrait of Gardner, drawing on her substantial personal archive and including previously unpublished findings to offer new perspectives on her life and her construction of identity.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
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
Stolen
$24.95
For the first time, The Gardner Museum has authorized a book on the daring theft from the Museum of 13 priceless works of art, including 3 Rembrandts and Vermeer’s The Concert, together worth over $500 million.
In 1903, Isabella Stewart Gardner opened her extraordinary museum, modeled after a Venetian palazzo, for the "enjoyment and education of the public forever." She had amassed an impressive collection including some of the finest masterpieces by Rembrandt, Titian, Raphael, and Botticelli, as well as works by her contemporaries such as Sargent, Whistler, and Degas. The art works included paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, furniture, ceramics, glassware, books, manuscripts and ephemera―all but 13 of which remain in place today.
In the early morning hours of March 18th, 1990, two thieves disguised as police officers talked their way into the museum, and tied up the night guards. They cut some of the paintings from their frames and stacked up others to take, leaving behind a priceless Rembrandt leaning against a chest. It is believed that the thieves “came for the Rembrandts”― but they also stole works by Vermeer, Degas, Manet, and Flinck, as well as a Chinese beaker and a Napoleonic eagle finial. Eighty-one minutes later, they were gone.
Stolen gives an inside look at the robbery and explores the impact of the missing works with commentary from the Museum’s Director, Curators, and the Chief Investigator. They describe how the theft, often called a crime against humanity, has affected visitors and disrupted Isabella Stewart Gardner's careful arrangement of the works. The book is highly visual, with original photographs of the stolen objects, as well as how they originally looked placed in the galleries. Stolen, the only book on the theft commissioned by the Gardner Museum, provides the context to a brazen heist that left one of the world’s great museums in search of its lost masterpieces.
The Museum is offering $10 million for safe return of all the works; the crime remains the largest unsolved art theft in history.
Learn even more about the art on WBUR's podcast Last Seen.
By Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum37 pages
Published by Applewood Books, 2018
Hardcover
10.5 x 8.5 inches
The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner 1887-1924
$48.00
Available exclusively through Gift at the Gardner, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is thrilled to offer a limited re-print of an "indispensable edition."
When Isabella Stewart Gardner agreed to sponsor the career of and aspiring young writer named Bernard Berenson, neither dreamed that together they would build one of this country's most impressive collections of Italian Renaissance painting. The correspondence between Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner offers fresh insight into the origins of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and gives voice to an enduring friendship that created and nurtured it.
The more than eight hundred letters included in this volume record the evolving relationship between two singular personalities: a flamboyant socialite known for lively eccentricities and her engagement with the arts; and the brilliant connoisseur and America's leading expert on Italian Renaissance painters. Their correspondence spans nearly four decades and presents a vivid portrait of their passionate interests, their perennial travels and their liaisons with artists and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic, including Edith Wharton, Walter Lippmann, Sarah Bernhardt, John Singer Sargent, and George Santayana.
Mary Berenson, who abandoned her comfortable and conventional first marriage to become protégée and, later, the wife and close collaborator of Berenson, becomes correspondent after 1901. Indeed, Mrs. Gardner's hunch that she now had "two friends instead of one" is borne out in the lively series of letters from Mary, who comes to play an increasingly vital role in her husband's multifaceted achievements.
The reprint of this indispensable 1987 edition includes a new preface co-authored by Dr. Machtelt Bruggen Israels, guest researcher, University of Amsterdam, and Dr. Carl Brandon Strehlke, curator emeritus, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Together they explore the relationship between Isabella Stewart Gardner and Bernard Berenson that emerges from the correspondence. Meticulously edited and annotated by Rollin van N. Hadley, former director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, these elegant and entertaining letters continue to be an enduring resource for art historians and others concerned with the development of connoisseurship and the evolution of taste. At the same time, they pay tribute to a remarkable museum and the very personal visions that brought it to life.
Edited and annotated by Rollin van N. Hadley, former director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
718 pages
Published by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2016
Paperback
9.1 x 1.8 x 6.4 inches
Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner's Travel Albums
$55.00
In 1865, art collector and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) lost her only child to pneumonia at less than two years old. In an effort to rouse her from depression, Gardner and her husband, Jack, traveled to northern Europe and Russia. It was the first of many trips abroad that would eventually take her from the Middle East to Asia—trips that she documented in exquisitely crafted collaged travel albums. Fellow Wanderer brings together nearly thirty of Gardner’s striking travelogues, spanning some thirty-nine countries and offering invaluable perspective on the global influences on this legendary collector and patron of the arts.This book features beautiful facsimiles of Gardner’s travel albums—largely unpublished until now—along with essays by leading scholars who place these diaries and sketchbooks within the context of the art and culture of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia in the nineteenth century. The essays explore a host of topics, such as Gardner’s engagement with world religions while abroad, how she incorporated designs and ideas from around the globe into her Boston museum, and the ways in which the imperial power structures of the era facilitated her travels.
Lushly illustrated, Fellow Wanderer provides a uniquely intimate look at how Gardner’s rich and diverse experiences abroad instilled her collecting and patronage with a truly global vision of art.
Edited by Diana Seave Greenwald (assistant curator, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) and Casey Riley
214 pages
Published by Princeton University Press, 2023
Hardcover
12" x 14"
Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer
$45.00
Betye Saar (b. 1926) is an artist whose assemblages tell visual stories and convey powerful political messages. A leading figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, she works with found objects—many of which she gathers on her extensive travels—to explore themes like symbolic mysticism, feminism, racism, and Eurocentric chauvinism. Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer sheds new light on Saar’s unique creative process, her trips around the world, and the diverse ways in which her artworks engage with global histories of travel and forced migration. It presents how the artist’s work conjures the transporting experience of a voyage to a faraway place.This beautifully illustrated book draws on original, in-depth interviews with Saar and the companions who accompanied the artist in her travels across four continents over several decades. Essays by leading scholars contextualize Saar’s journeys within her broader life and career, as well as how her practice fits into broader traditions—such as scrapbooking—in African American visual culture. In addition to providing this context, this book explores how Saar’s assemblage practice both echoes and provides a critical counterpoint to the collecting practices of Gilded Age American art collectors like Isabella Stewart Gardner.
Featuring a wealth of previously unpublished material—including almost thirty travel sketchbooks and two dozen finished assemblages—Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer provides a fresh look at a groundbreaking American artist while offering a timely social history of the impact of travel on the African American experience.
Edited by Diana Seave Greenwald (assistant curator, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum_ with contributions by Makeda Best and Stephanie Sparling Williams
208 pages
Published by Princeton University Press, 2023
Hardcover
8" x 14"
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"
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
Titian: Love, Desire, Death
$40.00
Titian's Rape of Europa
$25.00
Dubbed “a mighty poet” by American author Henry James, Titian remains one of the most celebrated painters in Western art. Since his death in 1576, the artist’s reputation has never waned. In Gilded Age America, Titian paintings became the peerless prizes of leading collectors and quickly rose to the top of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s wish list. In 1896, she landed his masterpiece, The Rape of Europa. It became the sole example of his celebrated cycle of poesie outside of Europe, inspired an entire gallery in her newly built museum, and contributed to England’s national outcry over the loss of its art treasures. This book – the first dedicated to Europa – tells the painting’s story in Gardner’s time, in Titian’s, and offers rare insights into the artist’s virtuoso technique.
Published here for the first time, dramatically enlarged details of the composition demonstrate Titian’s deft touch and dazzlingly technical accomplishment. These bravura passages recently revealed by the painting’s comprehensive cleaning – the first since its arrival in America – are accompanied by commentary from the conservator, Gianfranco Pocobene, who returned Europa to its original glory.
This book accompanies the Gardner Museum exhibition, Titian: Women, Myth, and Power, reuniting his poesie series in the United States for the first time. Gift at the Gardner also carries a hardcover title, Titian: Love, Desire, Death, which is the National Gallery’s exhibition catalog for the same suite of paintings.
Edited by Nathaniel Silver, previous William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (2018-2022)
80 pages
Published by Paul Holberton Publishing, 2020
Paperback
Measures 9.3" x 7.6"
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The Secret Language of Flowers: Notes on the Hidden Meanings of Flowers in Art
$36.00
During his 2012 residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel (born 1964) delved into the archives of the magnificent garden that Isabella Stewart Gardner cultivated around her residence.Othoniel examined the Museum and photographed the flowers in the tapestries, ironwork, architecture, furnishings and paintings, in such masterpieces as van Dyck's Portrait of a Woman with its innocuous rose, Piermatteo d'Amelia's Annunciation with its majestic lily and Bartolomé Bermejo's Saint Engracia with its enigmatic palm.
This gift-worthy volume presents his art-historical ABC of these flowers, from Acanthus to Zea Mays.
By Jean-Michel Othoniel
192 pages
Published by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2015
Hardcover
5.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 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
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
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
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
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
Su-Mei Tse: Notes
$20.00
With an almost Surrealist sensibility for collage and lyrical combinations and juxtapositions, the artist Su-Mei Tse experiments with free-form narrative to share the works and references that have inspired her on her creative path.
This artist book layers a variety of images with notes and quotes selected by Tse. It was published in conjunction with her exhibition, Floating Memories.
Born in Luxembourg, based also in Paris and Berlin, Su-Mei Tse has gained international recognition with her videos, photographs, sculptures, and installation works, which often incorporate sound and musical components. Her work explores the nature of perception and temporality, and urges viewers towards moments of deep introspection.
By Su-Mei Tse, edited by Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
80 pages
Published by Charta/Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2010
Paperback
6 x 0.5 x 7.2 inches
Stefano Arienti: The Asian Shore
$18.00
With an inexhaustible toolbox of techniques, a devotion to drawing and an almost-Surrealist knack for collage and uncanny combinations, the Milan-based artist Stefano Arienti has long been in search of new ways to make a mark while experimenting with free-form narrative.Especially suited to book form, the works collected in The Asian Shore are juxtaposed lyrically, with lines from one page seemingly disappearing into the book's gutter and reemerging in a new form on the next. This well-considered volume combines earlier work alongside more recent drawings inspired by the archives of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where Arienti made extensive use of the Oriental collection.
By Stefano Arienti, with text by Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Pietro C. Marani, and Alan Chong
76 pages
Published by Charta/Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2008
Hardcover
6.5 x 0.5 x 9.5 inches
The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance
$40.00
Cassoni is the Italian word for the chests, painted with scenes from myth and literature, central to upper-class weddings of the 15th century. Little known today, cassoni deserve recognition as masterworks of the Renaissance. Botticelli, Pesellino and other superlative artists painted them, and they are precious early examples of the mythopoetic subjects that would form the core of European art until the 20th century.
The essays in this book shed new light on the meaning of cassoni through informative discussions of Renaissance wedding rituals, male-female relations and daily domestic life. A catalog section on cassoni in the exhibition that this book accompanies provides a unique guide to the stories of love, marriage and politics depicted on these sumptuous objects.
By Cristelle Louise Baskins, Jacqueline Musacchio, and Adrian W Randolph
182 pages
Published by Pittsburgh Gutenberg Periscope Publishing, 2008
Hardcover
8.7 x 1 x 11.3 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
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
Raphael, Cellini, & A Renaissance Banker: The Patronage of Bindo Altoviti
$26.00
This book examines the patronage and life of Bindo Altoviti (1491-1556), a papal banker who divided his activities between Rome and Florence. His collection, while not large, included striking and innovative works by Raphael, Michelangelo, Benvenuto Cellini, Francesco Salviati, Jacopo Sansovino and Giorgio Vasari.This volume considers a wide variety of issues, including Bindo's banking and politics.
Edited by Alan Chong, Donatella Pegazzano, and Dimitrios Zikos
488 pages
Published by Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2003
Hard cover
11.3 x 1.4 x 8.6 x 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
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
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
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