Garden of Earthly Delights

Isabella Stewart Gardner was an avid and skilled gardener and landscape designer. It may be possible that her initial interest in horticulture came through her grandmother Isabella Tod Stewart, who received awards for agriculture from the state of New York (which Isabella put on display in the Short Gallery of the museum). Her home at 152 Beacon Street, Boston, was filled with tropical plants, large palms and ferns. She took advantage of large bay windows overlooking the sidewalk below to create a changing display of flowers visible to all passers-by. The flowers were grown by her father-in-law, John Lowell Gardner, Sr. whose relationship with Isabella possibly focused her gardening interests. John Sr. was a member of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and received many show awards for ornamental plants and vegetables. His extensive gardens at Green Hill, Brookline, were recognized in Boston and beyond, for their beauty and attention to detail.

Isabella and her husband inherited Green Hill in 1883 and she continued to reside there seasonally until 1919. Working with John Lowell Gardner Sr.’s English gardener, Charles Montague Atkinson, she honed her skills. With its extensive greenhouses, Green Hill provided an opportunity for her to explore plants and garden design. She continued to participate in the Massachusetts Horticultural Society annual shows and her efforts were rewarded with many awards for her floral entries. In addition, she created several theme gardens at Green Hill, including an Italian garden, an ‘English lawn’ and a Japanese Garden. Her gardening experience was manifest in the creation of the courtyard and gardens at Fenway Court in 1900, a “garden beautiful” to compliment the “house beautiful” within.

Top photo: Isabella Gardner in the conservatory at Green Hill, 1905. Photographer Thomas E. Marr.

Bottom photo: Japanese Garden, Green Hill, 1905. Photographer Thomas E. Marr.

- Kristin

As the Gardner Museum’s archivist, Kristin Parker tends to photographs and documents relating to Mrs. Gardner as carefully as Isabella tended her own gardens. Click here to read her most recent post on Mrs. Gardner’s travel scrapbooks.

Mrs. Gardner Abroad

Mrs. Gardner compiled 27 scrapbooks during her extensive world travels which included, in part, journeys to Europe, Turkey, Japan and Cuba and each experience was carefully recorded. In some scrapbooks, her observations are made in the style of an anthropologist taking field notes, as she sketched and defined hieroglyphics and illustrated monuments or jotted down excerpts from local myths. In others she included photographs purchased at local photographer’s shops, which catered to the tourist industry. Mrs. Gardner dedicated Sundays to her scrap booking, pasting photographs, pressed flowers and other ephemera into her books. The scrapbooks illustrate the link between her early travels and the later construction of her museum.

Isabella’s advice for the holiday table

As was the custom in nineteenth century society, great wealth brought civic responsibility. Mrs. Gardner fulfilled her duties with unusual flair. Fenway Court (the turn-of-the-century moniker for today’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) was the setting for events to benefit local charities as well as support for artistic creation. These events included an annual garden competition, plays performed in the Gothic Room, and modern dance performances. Concerts and lavish dinner parties also took place.

We’ve got rhythm

Take a sneak peak at this month’s gallery tour:

Sure, we have concerts every Sunday in season, performances throughout the year, and other hip events, but what is the rhythm of the Gardner? Seems obvious that old Isabella Gardner had style, but did she have rhythm? Could she boogie in those heavy, silk and satin, Victorian duds she wore? Let’s look to the design of her museum for answers. This is a short lesson in close looking and spatial awareness.

Think back about how you entered the museum. The entrance hall is low-ceilinged and cramped. Walking into the Spanish Cloister area gives you a bit more breathing room, and you see some art, and a little more interesting scenery. Once in the cloisters, windows allow views outside, and you get obstructed views of the courtyard. Most people naturally move toward the court to get the full view. When finally standing at the edge of the court, space, light, and color explode before you.

The short journey takes you from small, constricted, dark spaces to wide open wonder!

Who is Hemphill?

“Much was made of a four-horn group [Julius Hemphill's World Saxophone Quartet] working the turf of jazz without a rhythm section. Hemphill insightfully replied that he did not know what all the fuss was about. Nobody pointed to a string quartet to marvel at how well they got along with no rhythm section.”

On October 18, the Gardner will kick off this season’s Composer Portraits series with a concert of music by Julius Hemphill. If you’re a jazz fan, you may know him from the St. Louis-based Black Artists Group, or the revolutionary World Saxophone Quartet. But you may not know that he wrote classical music, too, for string quartet and piano. We’ll be playing it all in the concert at the next After Hours, but until then, a few words about his music from program annotator Ben Young:

Hemphill’s impact and legacy offer different things to different audiences. His identity as a fiery, constructive-minded alto saxophonist powered a substantial part of his recorded output, on which he appears as an improviser but not composer or arranger… Hemphill’s long-form writing for ensemble, with or without his participation as a player, is maybe the hardest subset of his writing to grasp..But the enduring benchmark of Hemphill’s identity as a music-maker is his craftsmanship and style as a jazz composer–arranger, the last giant in the 20th century to make an unmistakably new contribution to the field. This dimension of music making was neglected in the oeuvre that Hemphill entered when he moved to New York in 1973. Only the early work of Butch Morris suggested that there was anyone on the scene paying as much attention to the modernist precepts of beauty, ballad, close harmony, and tight execution.

Photo Roundup

This just in–our photos!

See more after the jump…

A penny for your thoughts

Okay, so we’re not actually paying, but we would love to hear more about what you thought of our first After Hours event last night. Personally, we were thrilled. More than 600 people came to our premiere to take in the art & ambiance, catch up with friends old and new, and enjoy live music and drinks around the courtyard, and we hear you had a great time.

Our friends over at Yelp are already buzzing about the evening, and a little bird tells us that Going will soon be posting pictures from the night. Keep an eye out for the next Improper, and if you’re lucky, your mug may just show up there, too. We’ll have our own Flickr album up on Monday, but in the meantime: what did you think? Add a comment below and let us know.

A couple words from people who attended:

“I think it’s great that one of the best museums in Boston is appealing to a wider audience & offering something to appeal to all 5 senses.”

The best aspect: “Feeling like I was at a private party at this beautiful museum!”

“Wonderful chance to mingle and enjoy the museum in an intimate atmosphere.”

“Relaxed and social vibe, good people watching and the most beautiful venue in the city.”

Why After Hours?

Well this is the first blog entry for Gardner After Hours - more to come from some of the cool artists, performers, and staff here at the museum who will be working with us on these nights.

So I guess the first question to be asked and answered is: why are we doing this? To me, the answer is pretty obvious: for you. It’s a new century, and in order to keep being accessible to visitors we have to be open at a time when they can actually visit! Don’t get me wrong; I love all the quirky, surprising and beautiful things about the Gardner, but the first thing I thought when I started working here over four years ago is WE NEED TO BE OPEN AT NIGHT! So after years of rallying the cause, it is finally going to happen and I couldn’t be happier!