Narrative Material
Courtyard Birds Scarf
$47.00
Based in Somerville, MA, Printed Village regularly issues challenges to artists around the world, creating unique and wearable designs from their submissions.
The Courtyard Birds scarf design is the winning style from a Gardner Museum-inspired challenge, created by artist Polypisut Chueobchoey. Participating artists drew inspiration from the Gardner's Courtyard.
75 x 37 inches
100% Polyester
Machine Washable
Courtyard Mums Scarf
$47.00
Based in Somerville, MA, Printed Village regularly issues challenges to artists around the world, creating unique and wearable designs from their submissions.
The Courtyard Mums scarf design is the winning style from a Gardner Museum-inspired challenge, created by artist Cathy Hunt. Participating artists drew inspiration from the Gardner's Courtyard.
75 x 37 inches
100% Polyester
Machine Washable
Nasturtium Scarf
$47.00
Based in Somerville, MA, Printed Village regularly issues challenges to artists around the world, creating unique and wearable designs from their submissions.
The Nasturtium Scarf design is the winning style from a Gardner Museum-inspired challenge, created by UK-based artist Natalia Gonzalez. Participating artists drew inspiration from the Gardner Museum's Nasturtium tradition.
Isabella Stewart Gardner started the tradition of placing colorful displays of Nasturtium vines that cascaded from the courtyard balconies at Fenway. The vines continue to come alive during the week before Easter as the Gardner Museum celebrates the arrival of spring.
75 x 37 inches
100% Polyester
Machine Washable
Fra Angelico Scarf
$47.00
The Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin
1430-1434
Fra Angelico, Italian, about 1400-1455
Fra Angelico’s technical and compositional innovations paved the way for a more modern manner of painting in Florence, and he found favor with important patrons, including two popes. This panel is the third in a set of four reliquaries, or containers for holy relics, depicting episodes from the Virgin’s life.
Nineteenth-century enthusiasts celebrated this Dominican painter “Fra Angelico” (the angelic friar) for the spiritual content and lyrical quality of his work. Most of his paintings in the United States are the surviving fragments of larger works, but this one is nearly intact and was greatly admired in Boston. Gardner’s friend the American painter John La Farge, whose works can be found in the Blue Room, once reminded her that even Robert Langton Douglas, a British art critic and director of the National Gallery of Ireland, praised Gardner’s Fra Angelico in his writings.
The Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin is the inspiration behind this Printed Village scarf, created by Nellik. Based in Somerville, MA, Printed Village regularly issues challenges to artists around the world, creating unique and wearable designs from their submissions.
75 x 37 inches
100% Polyester
Machine Washable
Titian Scarf
$47.00
The Rape of Europa
1559-1562
Titian (Pieve di Cadore, about 1488 - 1576, Venice)
Titian’s Rape of Europa, painted in Venice in the 1560s, is inspired by a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Infatuated with Europa, Jupiter—king of the gods—transforms himself into a beautiful white bull and joins a herd grazing near the seashore. After convincing Europa to climb on his back, the mischievous god seizes the opportunity and springs into the sea, spiriting away the target of his affections while she clings to him in terror. Jupiter races across the ocean and Europa holds on by one horn. Gazing back over her shoulder toward the shoreline, she waves a red silk veil to attract attention.
This scarf captures some of the breathtaking material in Titian's masterpiece: the rich red of Europa's silk veil; the putti--or male cherubs--who trail after Europa, bow and arrow in hand; and the vibrant colors of the tempestuous sky.
100% Polyester
Machine Washable
Fra Angelico Dormition Silk Scarf
$150.00
The Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin
1430-1434
Fra Angelico, Italian, about 1400-1455
Fra Angelico’s technical and compositional innovations paved the way for a more modern manner of painting in Florence, and he found favor with important patrons, including two popes. This panel is the third in a set of four reliquaries, or containers for holy relics, depicting episodes from the Virgin’s life.
Nineteenth-century enthusiasts celebrated this Dominican painter “Fra Angelico” (the angelic friar) for the spiritual content and lyrical quality of his work. Most of his paintings in the United States are the surviving fragments of larger works, but this one is nearly intact and was greatly admired in Boston. Gardner’s friend the American painter John La Farge, whose works can be found in the Blue Room, once reminded her that even Robert Langton Douglas, a British art critic and director of the National Gallery of Ireland, praised Gardner’s Fra Angelico in his writings.
33.5" x 45"
Bus Horses Silk Scarf
$150.00
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856 -1925), Bus Horses in Jerusalem, 1905
Horses have always fascinated artists. Here, Sargent renders these working horses with elegance and dignity. Less interested in the beauty of one single horse, Sargent chose an angle from which he was able to see the repeating forms of multiple backs. As Sargent stated in a letter to Isabella Stewart Gardner, he was drawn to the romantic appeal of the subject during a trip to the Middle East.
33.5 x 51 inches100% Silk
El Jaleo Silk Scarf
$150.00
El Jaleo
1882
John Singer Sargent, American, 1856-1925
Images like El Jaleo lean toward the daring, risky, unconventional, dramatic, erotically off-center, and odd. Because nomadic groups were believed to ignore ethical principles and exalted superstition over orthodox religion, they endured oppression in numerous countries during the nineteenth century, but artists and bohemians idealized them as free spirits. Bizet's opera Carmen, first performed in Paris in 1875, scandalized the public with its tale of a proud, lusty Andalusian protagonist torn between an army officer and a toreador.
During his travels in Spain in 1879, Sargent was mulling over a major work of art in which he could express his love of Romani music, dance, and picturesque costumes. On his return to Paris, he set to work on a wide horizontal picture whose proportions simulated the shallow stage space of popular musical establishments. He named the painting El Jaleo to suggest the name of a dance, the jaleo de jerez, while counting on the broader definition of jaleo,which includes ruckus or hubbub. The painting was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1882 with the more explicit title El Jaleo: Danse des gitanes (Dance of the Gypsies).
100% Silk
Rembrandt Self Portrait Silk Scarf
$150.00
Self-Portrait, Age 23
1629
Rembrandt van Rijn, 1606-1669
Rembrandt’s self-portraits, made throughout his long career, served many different purposes, and in these explorations of his own face and personality remain elusive in many ways. This is one of his first painted self-portraits, and unlike most of the earlier ones, it is not a study of expression or emotion. Indeed, the face, though beautifully lit with evocative shadows, is almost expressionless. The painting is all about costume: the plumed cap, silk scarf, and jacket suggest that this might be an elegant sitter, perhaps even an historic personage. The painting is large and carefully finished, almost as though it were a demonstration piece. In 1629, Rembrandt had not yet received any portrait commissions, so this work might have been done to show off his talents.
On the other hand, by 1629, the twenty-three-year-old artist had already begun to attract critical attention. Self-portraits were a desirable collectible for sophisticated connoisseurs, especially since Rembrandt here wears a golden chain, which indicates the status or nobility of the painter’s profession, although he had not received any such decoration.
100% Silk
San Giuseppe di Castello Silk Scarf
$150.00
San Giuseppe di Castello
1903
John Singer Sargent, American, 1856-1925
The different shades of the water, the brightness of the light and the dense urban architecture of Venice were elements that fascinated Sargent throughout his life. In this drawing, he turns a rather unspectacular neighborhood into a miraculous metaphor for the romantic appeal of Venice. His passion for the city apparently did not extend to its inhabitants: note, how little interest he showed in depicting the figures on the bridge.
100% Silk
33.5" x 51"
Santa Maria della Salute Silk Scarf
$150.00
Santa Maria della Salute
1903-1907
John Singer Sargent, American, 1856-1925
By depicting the back of Santa Maria della Salute, Sargent renders this iconic Venetian site from an unusual, less formal perspective. The cropped view of fishing boats moored in the Giudecca Canal suggests the spontaneity of a modern snapshot. With its golden sunlight and striking composition, this is one of Sargent’s most brilliant watercolors.
33.5 x 51 inches100% Silk
Tent in the Rockies Silk Scarf
$150.00
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856 - 1925), A Tent in the Rockies, about 1916
Sargent began many of his watercolors with careful pencil drawings that laid out the overall composition of each picture. If you look closely you can see traces of pencil in the folds of the tent’s opening. Light and shade effects, however, were rarely indicated through pencil under-drawings. Sargent would leave that to the skill of his brush in mixing colors, giving his watercolors their fresh beauty.
100% Silk
Chariot of Venus Scarf
$47.00
Francois Boucher (French, 1703 - 1770), The Chariot of Venus, 18th century
Painter to King Louis XV, François Boucher defined artistic tastes at the French court. He is best known for mythological paintings like this one, the compositions of which reached audiences far and wide through tapestry, porcelain, and print.
Gardner purchased this painting from Wildenstein and Co., venerable dealers of French art. She paid a fraction of the price of her most expensive Italian paintings. Gardner collected few Rococo works; perhaps she sought to fill the void in her collection with this one. It was installed in the Little Salon by 1912, along with a second painting of similar style and an embroidery made from Boucher’s designs, an apparent homage to the French master.
33 x 51 inches
100% Polyester
Machine Washable
El Jaleo Scarf
$47.00
El Jaleo
1882
John Singer Sargent, American, 1856-1925
Images like El Jaleo lean toward the daring, risky, unconventional, dramatic, erotically off-center, and odd. Because nomadic groups were believed to ignore ethical principles and exalted superstition over orthodox religion, they endured oppression in numerous countries during the nineteenth century, but artists and bohemians idealized them as free spirits. Bizet's opera Carmen, first performed in Paris in 1875, scandalized the public with its tale of a proud, lusty Andalusian protagonist torn between an army officer and a toreador.
During his travels in Spain in 1879, Sargent was mulling over a major work of art in which he could express his love of Romani music, dance, and picturesque costumes. On his return to Paris, he set to work on a wide horizontal picture whose proportions simulated the shallow stage space of popular musical establishments. He named the painting El Jaleo to suggest the name of a dance, the jaleo de jerez, while counting on the broader definition of jaleo,which includes ruckus or hubbub. The painting was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1882 with the more explicit title El Jaleo: Danse des gitanes (Dance of the Gypsies).
100% Polyester
Machine Washable
Fra Angelico Dormition Scarf
$47.00
The Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin
1430-1434
Fra Angelico, Italian, about 1400-1455
Fra Angelico’s technical and compositional innovations paved the way for a more modern manner of painting in Florence, and he found favor with important patrons, including two popes. This panel is the third in a set of four reliquaries, or containers for holy relics, depicting episodes from the Virgin’s life.
Nineteenth-century enthusiasts celebrated this Dominican painter “Fra Angelico” (the angelic friar) for the spiritual content and lyrical quality of his work. Most of his paintings in the United States are the surviving fragments of larger works, but this one is nearly intact and was greatly admired in Boston. Gardner’s friend the American painter John La Farge, whose works can be found in the Blue Room, once reminded her that even Robert Langton Douglas, a British art critic and director of the National Gallery of Ireland, praised Gardner’s Fra Angelico in his writings.
33 x 45 inches
100% Polyester
Machine Washable
Garden of Poppies Scarf
$47.00
Garden of Poppies
about 1891
John Appleton Brown, American,1844-1902
John Appleton Brown was a landscape painted and pastellist who had studied in France with Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875). Brown established himself in a Boston studio in 1875 and concentrated upon creating poetic and pastoral depictions of the New England landscape. In Garden of Poppies, Brown employs a bright pallet to create the freshness of poet Celia Thaxter's Appledore Island garden.
33 x 45 inches100% Polyester
Machine Washable
Girl with a Lute Scarf
$47.00
A Girl with a Lute
1520
Bartolomeo Vento, Italian, active 1502-1513
The lute and the song for tenor and bass lying open on the sill signify the artist's ambition to transcend the conventions of painting and produce a song-haunted mood. This lyrical idea overran Lombardy and Venice in the early sixteenth century and had been quickly brought to its most moving pitch at Venice in the light and color of Giorgione. Here somber shadow prevails, under the influence of the more mystic Leonardo. The picture was painted presumably in Milan, where there are still three versions, two of them by Bartolommeo himself, one of these bearing the same date.
33 x 42 inches100% Polyester
Machine Washable
Isabella Scarf
$47.00
Isabella Stewart Gardner
1888
John Singer Sargent, American, 1856-1925
Mrs. Gardner sat for Sargent during his visit to Boston in January 1888. He was paid $3000 for the portrait, which was exhibited to great acclaim at Boston’s St. Botolph Club. The work also inspired gossip and legend: someone jokingly titled it “Woman: An Enigma,” while others believed that the sensuous display of flesh deliberately echoed the scandal recently created by Sargent’s Madame X. Mrs. Gardner herself said that she rejected eight renderings of the face until she was satisfied.
In its gallery, surrounded by altarpieces, stained glass, and religious statuary, the sacramental quality noted by nineteenth-century reviewers is even more pronounced.
100% Polyester
Machine Washable
Ponte della Canonica Scarf
$47.00
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856 - 1925), Ponte della Canonica, 1903-1907
Sargent and Isabella Stewart Gardner shared a lifelong love of Venice. Both visited the city repeatedly and knew it well. This view, as many others, was painted by Sargent from a gondola. Perhaps looking at this picture, Gardner remembered one of her own gondola rides on Venice's canals. She purchased it many years after her last visit to the lagoon city.
33 x 51 inches
100% Polyester
Machine Washable
Return from the Lido Scarf
$47.00
Return from the Lido
1884
Ralph Wormeley Curtis, American, 1854-1922
Ralph Curtis was the son of Daniel and Arianna Curtis, Bostonians who moved permanently to Venice in the late 1870s. After graduating from Harvard (where he was one of the founders of the Lampoon), Curtis studied in Paris at the studio of Carolus-Duran. There he met John Singer Sargent, a distant relative, who became a good friend and sometime painting companion. Curtis met Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1884, when the Gardners spent five weeks in Venice. Thereafter, they met and corresponded frequently. Curtis found works of art for Mrs. Gardner, wrote about developments in the art world, and kept her up-to-date on “gondola gossip” in Venice.
Ralph Curtis’s painting of a gondola gliding through Venice must have held special meaning for Mrs. Gardner. Like the woman depicted, she and Curtis spent many hours in each other’s company floating through the canals. The slight touch of purple through the sky and in the water, along with the mysterious faces of the woman and her gondolier, adds the perfect tone of languid, exotic atmosphere to the scene.
100% Polyester
Machine Washable
Saint George Scarf
$47.00
Saint George Slaying the Dragon
1470
Carlo Crivelli, Italian, about 1430-1495
Charged with excitement and bristling with spiky forms, Saint George Slaying the Dragon is one of Carlo Crivelli’s masterpieces. Although the artist worked for more than thirty years after painting it, he never produced anything quite so full of vigor and imagination. What could be more dramatic than the contrast between the rearing horse, its head distorted with fear, and the tender saint, his eyes fixed on the dragon he is about to slaughter? Crivelli’s saint is no robust hero, but a slim boy who must use all his might to wield his heavy sword. The jutting shapes of his armor are echoed in the towers of the hill town in the background. On a cliff just below it, kneels the tiny figure of the princess who was to be the dragon’s next victim.
Few paintings in the Gardner Museum are more self-sufficient. Yet Crivelli’s Saint George originated as part of a large altarpiece. Crivelli made the altarpiece for the parish church of Porta San Giorgio, a village near Fermo on the Adriatic coast. It was commissioned by an Albanian immigrant, Giorgio Salvadori.
100% Polyester
Machine Washable
Santa Maria della Salute Scarf
$47.00
Santa Maria della Salute Polyester Scarf
Tent in the Rockies Scarf
$47.00
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856 - 1925), A Tent in the Rockies, about 1916
Sargent began many of his watercolors with careful pencil drawings that laid out the overall composition of each picture. If you look closely you can see traces of pencil in the folds of the tent’s opening. Light and shade effects, however, were rarely indicated through pencil under-drawings. Sargent would leave that to the skill of his brush in mixing colors, giving his watercolors their fresh beauty.
33 x 51 inches
100% Polyester
Machine Washable
Triumphs Scarf
$47.00
The Triumphs of Love, Chastity and Death
about 1450
Francesco Pesellino, Italian, about 1422-1457
In characteristic fashion, Bernard Berenson paid court to his patron, complimented her discernment, and spurred her acquisitiveness and rivalry with other collectors. Gardner was indeed lucky to get the two Pesellino panels since in the latter half of the nineteenth century, dealers and collectors had raised the demand for Renaissance painted wedding furniture. The cassone panels feature five parade floats, forming a grand procession that culminates in a celestial vision of God at the end of time. The imagery derives from Petrarch’s fourteenth-century allegorical poem, The Triumphs of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity. In his letters to Gardner, Berenson singled out the final tableau for praise, but he referred to it as the triumph of Religion rather than Eternity; presumably this substitution of titles was calculated to appeal to Gardner’s deepening piety. Religious sentiment mingled with courtly love proved irresistible, so it’s no wonder that Berenson also deliberately tailored his description of the first panel to include the triumph of “Chivalry” rather than Petrarch’s more conventional Fame. With such coded language, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Bernard Berenson shaped history through imagination and fantasy; they engaged with the Renaissance past through scholarship, research, and travel, but they also enjoyed the role-playing of a good costume drama!
100% Polyester
Machine Washable
Young Lady of Fashion Scarf
$47.00
A Young Lady of Fashion
early 1460's
attributed to Paolo Uccello, Italian, 1397-1475
The portrait has a highly decorative quality in which costume and ornament play a major role. The rather flatly modeled face is placed on an insubstantial bust set against a uniform blue background. The woman is portrayed both according to literary notions of female pulchritude, which called for fair skin and blonde hair, and the dictates of contemporary fashion. Costly brocaded fabrics, pearls, and precious stones serve not only to display the sitter’s familial wealth and status but also to enhance her physical appearance – in art, as in life. In addition to a red and gold brocade sleeve and a sleeveless overdress, the woman wears a head brooch, a pearl choker with jeweled pendant, and a white cap ornamented with pearls.
This fashionable beauty looks impassive, immobile, and immutable, as if she were outside space and time. Her portrait image has a static, stereotyped character, in which the sitter’s individuality is almost entirely suppressed in favor of the social ideals for which she stands.
In August 2018, choreographer, painter, dancer, and director Shen Wei transformed the Artist-in-Residence apartment at the Museum into a working studio. Wei was introduced as a young child to a variety of traditional Chinese art forms including opera, watercolor, and ink drawing. Today he is an artist who moves freely across mediums to find spiritual meaning in an increasingly material world. One of the works he was drawn to during his residency is the A Young Lady of Fashion, located in the Long Gallery. This Renaissance portrait, painted in profile, has a striking resemblance to a member of the Shen Wei Dance Arts. The encounter with this artwork inspired Shen Wei and ultimately led to the creation of Passion Spirit, a film shot at the Museum and at the Arnold Arboretum the following Summer.
33 x 51 inches100% Polyester
Machine Washable
Geo Flamingo Scarf
$36.00
Printed Village designs reinterpret organic elements, colors and patterns for a modern world. Lightweight and stylish, this scarf will be a chic, finishing touch to any outfit.
75 x 37 inches
100% Polyester
Machine Washable
© 2022 Gift at the Gardner.
