54 Zorn in Boston

55

A woman dressed in black came in and looked around in my rooms. She stopped in front of my Omnibus, turned to me, pointed at the painting in question. “I want to have that painting. May I buy it?” “Yes,” I answered. “Who is Zorn?” “I am” “Oh, you! I feel that either we will soon become enemies, or also forever, very, very good friends. Come to tea with me this afternoon.1

a n de rs z orn’s account in his memoir s of his f irst m eet ing with Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) has become legendary. The encounter took place in Chicago at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, the colossal public exhibition commemorated the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. Zorn had been appointed the commissioner of fine art for his nation. His charge to curate the Swedish art section of the Fine Arts Building required overseeing the installation in three galleries of 150 paintings and sculptures by 71 Swedish artists. Included in the exhibition were oil paintings, etchings and sculpture amply representing his own oeuvre.2 The Chicago World’s Fair, which lasted six months and was attended by tens of millions of people, was a major stage for Zorn’s debut in the United States. The critical acclaim and celebrity status he received there garnered him the attention of America’s wealthiest art collectors and patrons.3 One such art-lover was Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was already renowned for her notorious portrait by John Singer Sargent.4 Isabella and her husband John ‘Jack’ Lowell Gardner attended a preview of the Fair ahead of its official public opening on 1 May,5 a privilege accorded to her for lending to the exhibition her painting The Interior of the Abbey Church of Saint Denis by Paul-César Helleu.6 Unsurprisingly, while in the city Gardner cut “a wide swathe in Chicago society” and was “a conspicuous figure.”7 The writer Henry James imagined among all the wondrous pavilions of the Fair “in a category by itself, Mrs. Jack’s building.”8 Had such an edifice existed, Zorn’s Omnibus would have been its star and indeed only exhibit. Gardner paid $1600 for the modernist scene of Parisian commuters (cat. 5b).9 It was the most expensive picture and the only oil painting she would purchase that year.10

Zorn’s recollection of their meeting as an auspicious moment that combined coincidence and spontaneity benefited in no small amount from hindsight.11 By the time he completed his memoirs in 1914, he and Gardner had been “very, very good friends” for almost a quarter of a century and she had become one of his most important American patrons.12 By then Gardner had amassed a collec-tion of Zorn’s work numbering five oil paintings, six drawings and seventy-eight

This essay owes much to the guidance and collegiality of Erica Hirshler.

1 Zorn 2004, p. 127, and Carter 1972, pp. 137–38. 2 For the arrangement of the Swedish art

galleries, see Farrar 1893, p. 30. For Zorn’s exhibited works of art, see Bancroft 1893, II, pp. 749–56, and Walton 1893, pp. 59–61.

3 Isabella Stewart Gardner bought The Omnibus, 1892; George W. Vanderbilt purchased The Waltz, 1891 (oil on canvas, 195 × 133.5 cm, Ashville, North Carolina, Biltmore Estate); Charles Deering acquired a nude painting called “Summer,” and C.T. Yerkes bought another nude, entitled “Sunset,” and Nude under a Spruce Tree, 1892 (see fig. 27). For Zorn’s success in Chicago, see Boethius 1956, p. 5, Hyland 1986, pp. 21–24, and Hagans 2009, chap. 5.

4 John Singer Sargent, Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1888 (see fig. 49).

5 Isabella and Jack left Boston for Chicago on 16 April and returned on 8 May 1893; John Lowell Gardner to Charles Greeley Loring, 15 April and 10 May 1893, Archives, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

6 About 1891: oil on canvas, 194 × 155 cm, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; Harlow Niles Higginbotham, president of the World’s Columbian Exposition, to Isabella Stewart Gardner, 10 April 1894, Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

7 Boston Daily Globe 1893, p. 20. 8 Henry James to ISG, 1 May 1893; Mamoli

Zorzi 2009, p. 197. 9 Anders Zorn, Chicago, to ISG, 15 July [1893]

(Appendix 4, no. 1). 10 The only other painting Gardner bought in

1893 was John La Farge, The Recording Angel, 1890, watercolor on paper, 207 × 260 mm, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. She paid $180 for the work.

11 It is possible that Gardner had heard of

Zorn in Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s “Faithful Painter”

anne-marie eze

56 Zorn in Boston

Zorn as early as 1883, from a long article on him in a Boston newspaper: Hagans 2009, pp. 23–25. Gardner could have also known of Zorn’s paintings exhibited in Paris around 1890 from reports in American newspapers (for example The New York Times 1892, and through her friends Whistler, Sargent, and La Farge, who also exhibited there in the same period. Gardner may have visited the first Salon du Champ de Mars in Paris, where Zorn exhibited four portraits and a plein-air nude, during her three-week Parisian sojourn in May and June 1890. At any rate, Zorn was a celebrated artist, who had painted portraits of several Americans in Europe in the 1880s. Before arriving in Chicago, he spent a few weeks in New York City, where he received his first com-missions in the United States and exhibited etchings at the gallery of Frederick Keppel, who later became his agent. The Keppel show received press coverage: see New York Times 1893, and Hagans 2009, pp. 59–62.

12 Zorn wrote his memoirs between 1907 and 1914: Hagans 2009, p. 345, n. 6.

13 Zorn’s American sojourns spanned the years 1893–1911.

14 They visited Venice and the Veneto in October–November 1894, and Paris in December 1894 and May–June 1895. Gardner planned in vain to visit Zorn in Sweden.

15 Gardner patronized to a lesser extent the Italian Antonio Mancini and Frenchman Paul César Helleu, as well as supporting American expatriates Whistler and Sargent.

16 Gardner had the interiors of her homes and museum periodically photographed to record her installations, major additions to her collec-tion and changing arrangements. The principal rooms at Beacon Street were documented in 1880, 1890, and the mid 1890s by several dif-ferent photographers before Gardner settled on Thomas E. Marr and his son Arthur: see Gardner 2011, pp. 19 and 39.

17 Titian, The Rape of Europa, ca. 1560–62, oil on canvas, 178 × 205 cm; Johannes Vermeer, The Concert, 1665, oil on canvas, 72.5 × 64.7 cm; Sandro Botticelli, The Tragedy of Lucretia, ca. 1500–01, oil on wood, 83.8 × 176.8 cm; and Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, Aged 23, 1629, oil on wood, 89.7 × 73.5 cm. Gardner acquired these paintings between 1892 and 1896 (all Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; The Concert was stolen in 1990).

18 Marr 2040, photograph of the Red Drawing Room at 152 Beacon Street, late 1890s.

19 The term “observation points” to describe

etchings, which she displayed prominently in Fenway Court (now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; see Appendix 3). In the 1890s she had been instru-mental in the staging of two solo exhibitions of Zorn’s work in Boston—and would organize a third, memorial show after his death—and the commissions of several portraits. Zorn and Gardner had spent time together on each of the art-ist’s seven trips to the United States,13 enjoyed memorable art and leisure-filled vacations in Europe,14 and exchanged numerous spirited letters (see Appendix 4). Therefore, Zorn’s anecdote of his first encounter with Isabella Stewart Gardner should be understood as summarizing two major aspects of their relationship—mutually inspiring roles as artist and patron-muse, and a lifelong friendship.

Less than a year after their first meeting, Zorn caricatured Gardner’s growing importance as a patron to artists and musicians with a witty drawing of Isabella Stewart Gardner as the Madonna of Charity supporting babies representing the arts of music and painting (cat. 26a). Their artist-patron relationship, however, was unique because Zorn was the only European artist Gardner supported at length,15 and she was his only long-term, significant female collector. Furthermore, most American collections of Zorn privileged portraits in oil and etchings, whereas Gardner appreciated the range of subjects and techniques in his work, also col-lecting nudes and genre scenes, and drawings.

Gardner manifested her love of Zorn’s work in her art installations in Boston. As we shall see, she displayed his art prominently both in her home at 152 Beacon Street, in Boston’s affluent Back Bay neighborhood, where she lived from 1862 to 1901, and later at Fenway Court, her museum and residence from 1901 until her death. Photographs taken of rooms at both sites,16 and the existing galleries of the Gardner Museum, show that she created bold aesthetic ensembles that harmoniously mingled objects—paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles, decorative arts, and architectural elements—from different cultures and epochs, and invited the viewer to construct individual meaning. Like other works greatly valued by Gardner, many of Zorn’s paintings were placed in privileged positions—beside windows in order to catch the best natural light; on furniture from which they could be compared to nearby masterpieces from her collection; and in contexts that evoked themes or personal recollections.

Morning Toilet (cat. 12) was first displayed at Gardner’s home on Beacon Street in a formal first-floor reception room called the Red Drawing Room. Placing it among works by the famous Old Masters Botticelli, Titian, Vermeer, and Rembrandt,17 Gardner perched Zorn’s painting on a chair by a French door, through which passing light was softened by a lace curtain (fig. 30). Another view of the Drawing Room shows that Vermeer’s The Concert hung on the wall at a slight distance behind it.18 The pairing formed an “observation post” that

page 56Marr 2046. Photograph of 152 Beacon Street, Music Room with Zorn’s Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice, 1894 , by entrance, late 1890s/1899–1900Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

57

Gardner’s creation of study pairings of masterpieces was coined in Higgonet 2009, pp. 48–50.

20 It was not photographed in this location but is described in the Gardner list of 1897.

21 From 1907–14; it was first described in the Chinese Room in Gardner 1907, p. 6.

22 Gardner 2011, p. 42.

juxtaposed the old and modern, provoking a comparison between innocent nude bathing outdoors and sophisticated music-making inside an elegant home, and between Vermeer’s and Zorn’s mastery of depicting light as well.19 On the completion of Fenway Court in 1903, Gardner placed Morning Toilet by the courtyard balcony in the Veronese Room (see fig. 1). This space recalls the opulence of eighteenth-century Venice through its layering of gilt and painted stamped leather wall-panels, lacquered furniture, delicate laces, translucent porcelain and glass, mottled mirrors, and Venetian painting of that period and of the Renaissance. The sumptuous late Baroque setting contrasts with the delicacy of Zorn’s little painting.

The Omnibus (cat. 5b) was more peripatetic, its position gaining in prominence and meaning. It moved from a second or third-floor hallway in the Beacon Street house,20 to a corner of Fenway Court’s first Chinese Room,21 and in 1915 to the east wall of the Blue Room (fig. 31), before reaching its final resting place adja-cent to a north-facing window in the same gallery. The Blue Room is home to many of Gardner’s nineteenth-century American and European paintings, as well as books, letters, and photographs of leading literary figures of her day. In this space, she found the perfect setting for Zorn’s depiction of contemporary urban

Fig. 30Marr 2036. Photograph of 152 Beacon Street, Red Drawing Room with Zorn’s Morning Toilet, 1888, on a chair beside the window, ca. 1900Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

58 Zorn in Boston

Fig. 31Marr 2045. Photograph of Fenway Court, Blue Room with Zorn’s Omnibus on the far wall, 1915Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

life.22 The snug fit of The Omnibus—its large size accentuated by an imposing black frame—on a small projecting wall-space, which is reduced further by a table placed beneath it, enhances the viewer’s sense of the claustrophobia of the Parisian commuters. The neighboring mirror and window respectively double the interior of the streetcar and transport us from the boulevards of Boston to those of Paris receding into the background of the canvas. The morning light coming in through the Blue Room’s window complements the dramatic shard of light from an unseen aperture that strikes Zorn’s foremost female figure.23

Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice (cat. 1a), painted by Zorn in Palazzo Barbaro in 1894, was always displayed by Gardner in Venetian settings. In Beacon Street, the lively portrait hung at the entrance to the Music Room welcoming guests with outstretched arms to her society recitals by celebrity musicians and singers (see p. 54). Positioned near Ralph Curtis’s languid painting Return from the Lido,24 Zorn’s portrait reminded its beholder of Gardner’s role as a great salonnière both in Venice and in Boston. In Fenway Court, Gardner initially placed her portrait in the Chinese Room (fig. 32). By no means exclusively dedicated to Asian art, the richly decorated gallery juxtaposed Japanese screens, Chinese silks, and a variety of Asian sculpture with Italian and Italian orientalizing furniture. Here portraits of Isabella and Jack painted by Zorn and by Antonio Mancini in Venice embodied the lagoon city’s long history as the threshold between East and West. When Gardner re-organized her museum in 1914, and the Chinese Room became

23 Goldfarb 1995, p. 31.24 Ralph Curtis, Return from the Lido, 1884, oil

on canvas, 74 × 142 cm, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

25 Boston 2004, p. 109.

59

26 Marr 24329, Long Gallery, East Wall, 1926. 27 24 November 1920, unidentified newspaper

article. 28 Appendix 4, no. 25.

the Room of Early Italian Paintings, she moved Zorn’s painting to its present location in the Short Gallery. A small nexus between the Raphael and Tapestry rooms and the Little Salon, the space also functions as a gallery of Gardner and Stewart family portraits. Alan Chong commented on the appropriateness of its final placement there, near Carpaccio’s Gondolier and Mancini’s portrait of Jack, in a “Venetian alcove—a homage to the Palazzzo Barbaro.”25

Gardner and Zorn’s lifelong friendship is epitomized by the Modern Artists and Sculptors Case in the museum’s Long Gallery, which displays mementoes of her relationship with artists of her day. Gardner’s special affection for Zorn is indicated by her original placement of a bust photograph of him at the center of the case, on top of a pile of letters that chart Gardner’s patronage of him.26 Most poignant is a cablegram informing Gardner of Zorn’s death, on which is written her response, “Much distressed. Greatest sympathy for loss” (cat. 30). Like the “magnificent laurel wreath” Gardner placed at the base of a pedestal surmounted by Zorn’s photograph in the year he died, 27 the case is a memorial to the artist and a lasting tribute to their closeness.

Hitherto unpublished snapshots of Gardner taken by Zorn in 1904 during a visit to Greenhill, her country estate in Brookline, Massachusetts, show her at ease with the artist (fig. 33). Zorn’s letters to Gardner reveal that they lay aside formalities after their first holiday together in Venice in 1894, after which he addressed her jovially as “my dear Lady” or “Mrs. Isabella G.” and signed off

Fig. 32Marr 7762. Photograph of Fenway Court, first Chinese Room with Zorn’s Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice, 1894, by the fireplace, 1903Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

60 Zorn in Boston

29 Hagans 2009, pp. 145–55 and 168.30 ISG to Gaillard Thomas Lapsley, 30 January

[1899], The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, New Haven.

31 William Amory Gardner to Morris Carter, 6 October 1926, Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

32 Appendix 4, no. 34. 33 ISG to Joseph Lindon Smith, 4 November

1894, Archives of American Art, Washington.34 Zorn 2004, pp. 138–39. 35 Jack Gardner, diary, 3 and 4 November

[1894]. 36 Appendix 3, no. 20. 37 New York Times 1895.38 Jack Gardner was so angered by the gossip

surrounding Sargent’s portrait of his wife that he forbade her to show it again in public during his lifetime. Isabella honored her husband’s wishes and went further, keeping it out of the sight of all but friends and special visitors until her own death thirty-six years later. The painting appears to have been hidden in Jack’s study in Beacon Street, and then in the Gothic Room at Fenway Court. The windows of the latter room where draped off from curious eyes, and the room opened to the public only in 1925, a year after Gardner’s death: see Hirschler 1998, p. 139, and Gardner 2011, p. 296.

39 Gardner rarely posed for her likeness, so

“your obedient/faithful/affectionate painter” (see Appendix 4). Though her letters to Anders Zorn are lost, it is clear that Gardner wrote frequently in the 1890s to enquire about his latest works and after his health and that of his wife Emma. Zorn’s letters show that Zorn and Gardner fell out and quickly made up in a way that only close friends can. We can but imagine her reply to his: “Not a word from you since my English letter [….] Are you very very angry? [...] Do write!!! Please!”28

Gardner and Zorn supported each other during significant personal moments in each other’s lives. When he was far from home on his first American trip, she hosted his thirty-fourth birthday party at her Beacon Street home, with musical entertainment by the violinist Charles Martin Loeffler and pianist Ferruccio Busoni (cat. 25a–b). On a more serious occasion, when Zorn was embroiled in an ugly, drawn-out lawsuit against the St. Louis magnate Henry Clay Pierce, who refused to pay for three family portraits which had not satisfied him, Gardner offered to testify “as a connoisseur and art critic in aid of her friend Zorn.”29 In return, Zorn “did much for” Gardner, distracting her from her grief, just weeks after she had been widowed, by painting portraits of her family and close friends.30 After her death, her nephew William Amory Gardner, whose portrait Zorn had painted in that period of mourning, confessed: “My folks have always hated it. I myself had it painted to please Aunt Belle, but never liked it and felt last year perfectly willing to exchange it for a few dollars” (fig. 85).31

Zorn’s mythopeic anecdote about his auspicious first meeting with Gardner fails to capture the mutual benefits of their relationship. His exuberant portrait of Gardner in Venice was a triumph for them both. Two years after the picture’s completion, he complained to her: “I have as you told me tried hard to keep upp to your portrait, but alas all my subjects are not Mrs Gardner and the back-grounds not canale grande.”32 Gardner was ecstatic with the outcome, raving about it to an artist-friend: “[…] a portrait of me, astounding! […] Exactly like me.”33 In his memoirs, Zorn concurred that he had succeeded in capturing “com-pletely her character. Grandly majestic more than most and a charm in the voice that turned the rest of us into slaves.”34

The portrait embodies the way that, as celebrity artist and muse, Zorn and Gardner basked in each other’s limelight. It was greatly admired in Venice by visitors to the Palazzo Barbaro,35 and in Paris at the 1895 Salon du Champ de Mars, where it received critical acclaim from the press.36 In America, The New York Times reported on its excellent likeness before it had even reached these shores.37 Gardner’s portrait was newsworthy because the only other famous painting of her, by Sargent, had not been seen in public since its scandalous debut at the St. Botolph Club in Boston in 1888.38 Zorn’s portrait was prominently displayed in

Fig. 33anders zornPhotograph of Isabella Stewart Gardner at Greenhill, 1904Zorn Museum Archive, Mora, no. zfo 1638

61

the only other possible contenders were Whistler’s charming but small pastel The Little Note in Yellow and Gold, 1886, chalk and pastel on cardboard, 270 × 140 mm (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), and lackluster portraits by Dennis Miller Bunker (1889) and Ludwig Passini (1892), neither of which she displayed in her museum.

40 New York Post 1911. 41 ISG to Henry Swift, 14 November 1911,

Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

42 Ralph Wormeley Curtis to Isabella Stewart Gardner, 13 April [1894], Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. “The Crown Princess of Sweden wants the Barbaro but she can’t have it now:” Mamoli Zorzi 1989, pp. 101, 116, n. 4.

43 Anders Zorn, The Lace Makers, 1894, oil on canvas, 92 × 65 cm, private collection; Anders Zorn, In My Gondola, 1894, oil on canvas, 67 × 91 cm, Zorn Museum, Mora.

44 Jack Gardner, diary, 3–24 December 1894. 45 Ralph Wormeley Curtis to ISG, Saturday

night, December 1894, Archives, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

46 Probably the “picture” with Keppel, referred to by Zorn in letters to Gardner in 1895–96; Appendix 4, nos. 50–51. The lack of receipt or other record of payment for the painting suggests it was a gift.

47 Zorn brought this to Gardner in Venice as a gift: see Facos 1993, p. 40 n. 31.

48 Bernard Berenson to ISG, 21 July 1907:

rooms at Beacon Street and Fenway Court, which were fully accessible to family and friends, and to the general public on open days. Thus Zorn’s Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice became the official, iconic portrait of Gardner in her lifetime.39 Its status as such was confirmed by Gardner’s reaction to a sensationalist news-paper article of 1911 that claimed:

“[…] dissatisfied with her portrait by Andreas Dorn [sic!], Mrs. Gardner has restored to favor the portrait painted by John S. Sargent [….] Mrs. Gardner was not quite satisfied with Sargent’s portrait a close friend has said. Sometime later she met, in Venice, Andreas Dorn, the famous Swedish artist. Dorn was eager to paint the Boston matron. His original and rather unique suggestion of a pose appealed to Mrs. Gardner’s esthetic ideas of art. Dorn’s portrait was given the place of honor in a private room which is now taken by Sargent’s canvas.”40

Gardner immediately consulted her lawyer, protesting “of course there is not a word of truth in what this newspaper says.”41

Zorn and Gardner’s mutually beneficial artist-muse relationship extended beyond her portrait to the exchange of cultural experiences and artworks. By hosting Zorn and his wife at the Palazzo Barbaro for a month during their first visit to Venice in 1894, Gardner gave them an unforgettable experience that was the envy of the Swedish royal family, whose request to rent it was denied in the same year.42 Though occupied with sightseeing, gondola rides, shopping, parties and concerts, the Venetian sojourn proved artistically stimulating for Zorn, who painted the superb Lace Makers and In My Gondola as well as Gardner’s portrait.43 To return the favor, Zorn enlisted Antonin Proust, France’s former minister of fine arts, to help him stage-manage the Gardners’ visit to Paris in 1895. Together they organized an itinerary packed with visits to artists’ studios, public galleries and exhibitions, private art collections, and evenings at the Folies Bergère.44 The pressure to repay and impress Gardner clearly put a strain on Zorn. In response to a now lost letter Gardner sent from Paris to their mutual friend Ralph Curtis, he replied, “I am sorry to hear Zorn is jumpy. Try settle him down.”45

Zorn repaid Gardner’s patronage with numerous gifts of his own etchings and drawings, the painted portrait of her in Venice, and probably also Morning Toilet.46 He also gave her Karl Fredrik Nordström’s pastel The Headland (cat. 26c).47 Zorn recommended pieces for Fenway Court, such as the delightful silver soap box by Christian Eriksson that now enlivens the Dutch Room (cat. 27). Most importantly, in 1907, Zorn assisted Gardner in procuring a miniature of a Seated Scribe attributed to the Venetian master Gentile Bellini through the Swedish

Fig. 34 Attributed to gentile belliniA Seated Scribe, 1479–80Gouache and pen with ink on paper, 182 × 140 mmIsabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

62 Zorn in Boston

Hadley 1987, p. 402, note.49 ISG to Bernard Berenson, 3 October [1907]:

Hadley 1987, p. 409.50 During Zorn’s lifetime Bostonians could see

the artist’s work in one-man and group shows on a total of five occasions, in 1894, 1896, 1899, 1913, and 1916: see Appendix 1.

51 Monet’s work was exhibited at Boston’s St. Botolph Club in 1892, 1895, and 1899: Birmingham 1991, p. 31.

52 Sargent had two one-man shows at the St. Botolph Club in 1888 and Copley Hall (Boston Art Students’ Association) in 1899: London 1998, pp. 274–75.

53 Whistler’s work was shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in 1879, at the St Botolph Club in 1894, and Copley Hall in 1904: Washington 1984, p. 315.

54 Fairbrother 1986, especially pp. 31–42.55 Whitehill 1970, I, pp. 127–28.56 ISG to Charles Greeley Loring, 10 January

[1894], Archives, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.57 Gardner also lent Zorn’s Henry G. Marquand,

1893, etching, 278 × 198 mm (zg 81). 58 1889; etching, 240 × 159 mm (zg 34). The

etchings were priced between $15 and $100 regardless of subject.

59 Horatio Greenough Curtis, a former neighbor of the Gardners on Beacon Street, purchased The Baritone Faure for $25, Mademoiselle Olga B for $35, and Madame Sn for $30; The Storm (Portrait of the artist on horseback) was bought for $25 by Augustus Lowell, son of John Amory Lowell, a friend of the Gardners; Mary Pratt, wife of con-gressman Charles Sprague Sargent, socialite and friend of the Gardners, acquired The Waltz for $35. Only two buyers are not clearly associ-ated with the Gardners —Miss Fannie Bartlett of 227 Commonwealth Avenue, who purchased The Fisherman of St. Ives for $25, and Miss Emily Tuckerman of 1600 I St., NW, Washington, DC, who bought The Artist and His Wife for $30.

60 Two years later a proposal to install Frederick William MacMonnies’s 1893 bronze life-size nude sculpture called Bacchante with Infant Faun in the courtyard of Boston Public Library was rejected following a great storm of public protest: Fairbrother 1986, pp. 61–63.

61 Boston Daily Advertiser 1894.

consul in Constantinople (fig. 34). This made Bernard Berenson, Gardner’s main art advisor, seethe with envy. “They say in London that you bought the Gentile Bellini miniature,” Berenson wrote petulantly to Gardner, “Do be a dear, and tell me if it’s so; why should I only remain in ignorance? ’Taint fair.”48 Gardner rubbed the salt into Berenson’s wound by replying: “Such an adorable and exqui-site thing. Zorn did this for me. It is a joy and rapture.”49

In the Hub: Zorn and Gardner in BostonIsabella Stewart Gardner energetically promoted Zorn in Boston, a city which he first visited in late 1893 at her request. She was instrumental in instigating, lending artworks to, co-curating and supporting the artist’s two solo shows in the 1890s, and a memorial exhibition in 1921.50 Thanks to Gardner, Zorn was one of the international artists best known to Bostonians at the time, alongside Claude Monet,51 Sargent,52 and Whistler.53

Zorn’s Boston debut was at the Museum of Fine Arts in March 1894. Situated on its original site in Copley Square, the museum was literally at the center of civic cultural life, and was the city’s most important art venue.54 Cosmopolitan in its outlook, in the same year the museum showed established first-rank inter-national artists Whistler and Puvis de Chavannes and mounted a large group exhibition of contemporary Dutch painters. Gardner’s success in securing such a prestigious venue for Zorn was undoubtedly helped by her husband Jack’s position as treasurer of the museum since 1886.55 Gardner’s correspondence with the museum’s director and chief curator Charles Greeley Loring indicates that they oversaw preparations and the installation of the show,56 since Zorn had left Boston the previous month. The exhibition consisted of fourteen oil paintings, of which more than half were recently completed portraits of American sitters, and the rest nudes in landscapes and genre scenes; plus thirty etchings with the same ratio of portraits to other subjects. Bostonians would have been particu-larly excited to see the paintings The Waltz (fig. 55), Mrs. Potter Palmer (cat. 4) and The Omnibus (cat. 5a) which the Chicago World’s Fair had made famous.

Gardner’s Omnibus was the only loan from a Bostonian collection, thus establishing her as a pioneering patron of Zorn in the city.57 A hitherto unpub-lished copy of the exhibition’s catalogue, annotated with the prices asked and paid for the paintings and etchings for sale, and the names of their buyers (figs. 35 and 36), shows that Gardner led by example. She paid the highest price, a huge $100 for an etched portrait of Rosita Mauri,58 and presumably rallied her friends to support the show, since most of the other buyers are identifiable as being in her circle.59 Interestingly, neither of the two paintings (a nude and a

63

62 Charles Greeley Loring to ISG, 30 March 1894, Archives, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

63 Exhibition of Paintings by Anders Zorn, St. Botolph Club, 10–27 April 1899.

64 Fairbrother 1986, pp. 40–42.65 Birmingham 1991, pp. 26–34.66 Loan Exhibition, Paintings by Claude Monet, 6

February – 23 February 1899, and Paintings, Dry Points and Etchings, in color, by Jean François Raffaëlli, 16 December – 31 December 1899, both at the St. Botolph Club.

67 Location unknown; reproduced in Hedberg 1923–24, I, p. 41, fig. 28.

68 ISG to Gaillard Thomas Lapsley, 30 January

landscape) offered were purchased. No nudes in any media sold, most likely owing to the prevailing conservatism in Boston.60 Despite this, the exhibition was well received. The Boston Daily Advertiser reported that Zorn’s “impressionist painting […] caused such a sensation” and predicted that he would “go back to Sweden with a heavy purse.”61 The critic’s description of Zorn as an impressionist indicates that he perceived him as a progressive, modern, international painter. The Museum of Fine Art’s director Loring was pleased, informing Gardner that the “exhibition has been wonderfully attractive to artists and public alike.”62

Zorn’s second solo exhibition in Boston took place five years later in 1899 at the St. Botolph Club,63 one of the city’s most sophisticated and innovative pri-vate members’ clubs devoted to the fine arts.64 Successfully blending its genteel Brahmin membership with an avant-garde daring, the club was a pioneering sup-porter of impressionism in America.65 In the same year as the Zorn show, it also exhibited American impressionists and international artists ranging from Monet to Jean-François Raffaëlli, between whom the Swede fitted perfectly.66 Once again Gardner’s connections helped her to secure the fashionable venue. Her brother-in-law George Augustus Gardner was a member, and Zorn’s portraits of his son George Peabody Gardner and son-in-law George Howard Monks were included in the show.

Gardner’s input to the St. Botolph exhibition was even larger than at the Museum of Fine Arts. Of the eighteen works displayed, two were lent from her collection (The Omnibus and Morning Toilet) and four were portraits of her rela-tives and close friends—Joseph Randolph Coolidge, John Chipman Gray,67 and the above mentioned George Peabody Gardner and Monks—which had been

Figs. 35, 36 Annotated copy, William Morris Hunt Memorial Library, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

64 Zorn in Boston

1899, The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, New Haven.

69 The portraits were the only oil paintings in An Exhibition of Etchings, Water Colours and Paintings by Anders L. Zorn at the Frederick Keppel & Co. Gallery in February 1899, and were praised in the The New York Times on 4 and 11 February 1899.

70 Boston Daily Advertiser 1899, p. 8. 71 Boston Evening Transcript 1899.72 Works of Jean-Francois Millet and the Barbizon

school, Jean-Charles Cazin, Joachin Sorolla and Claude Monet from Peter Chardon Brooks collection were donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston by his daughter in 1920.

73 Peter Chardon Brooks Papers: check to order of $3000, 22 April 22, 1899, to Anders Zorn from Peter Chardon Brooks for the portrait of Richard Middlecott Saltonstall. On reverse, inscribed by Zorn: Pay to Chas. Deering on order Anders Zorn. Zorn wrote to acknowledge receipt of the check and to thank Brooks for the commission on Gardner’s 152 Beacon Street stationary, thus reinforcing his status as Gardner’s artist. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

74 Sotheby’s, New York, 23 May 1997 (lot 350). For Davis, see Rice 1899, pp. 592–93.

75 Adolphus Busch, 1897, oil on canvas, 127 × 93.3

recently painted by Zorn in her Beacon Street home (cat. 24a). Thrilled with them, Gardner raved to a friend: “[…] four wonderful portraits—Each perfect in its way; & very unlike each other in feeling & handling. John Gray’s is amazing, but only after you have lived with it—Mr. Coolidge is there at first glance, & G.P. Gardner (the very whole of him)—& Dr. Monks has even a charm of readiness added—with more real beauty—the painting of them all was a great delight to us.”68

The four portraits were shown first in New York, where they were positively received.69 In Boston, the St. Botolph exhibition received more press coverage than Zorn’s debut show, but also mixed reviews for the first time. The Boston Daily Advertiser published a lengthy, mainly positive commentary, in which the critic remarked on Zorn being familiar in Boston, and credited Gardner for lending the artist her home for a studio and for encouraging him to exhibit in the city. It further praised Zorn and Gardner’s collaboration by concluding: “It goes without saying that the pictures are well hung for Mrs. Gardner and Zorn himself attended to the matter.”70 The Boston Evening Transcript’s reviewer was more critical of Zorn’s style, which he found lacking in delicacy, and lampooned Zorn’s likenesses of the former president Grover Cleveland as “painted by a violent political opponent,” and of George Peabody Gardner as “thoughtless […] [will] go down to prosperity as a billiard player.”71

The St. Botolph exhibition had a greater outcome for Zorn in Boston than his debut show. It gained him four new commissions for portraits in oil, some closely modeled on works in the show, unlike the earlier exhibition at which only etchings were sold. Two requests came from Gardner’s circle, the portrait of her nephew William Amory Gardner, and the young society beauty Miss Martha Dana (cat. 24d). More importantly, Zorn won two commissions from outside of the Gardner clan, from Peter Chardon Brooks and Edward Davis Livingstone. Both men were patrons of Sargent and commissioned family portraits from Zorn to accompany paintings done by the American expatriate in 1890. Brooks was a member of a long-established affluent family of New England merchants and a distinguished art collector.72 He paid Zorn the respectable sum of $3000 to paint Richard Middlecott Saltonstall, who had married his daughter Eleanor in 1891 (fig. 37).73 Depicted in a three-quarter-length turned pose, one arm hidden and the other holding a hat, Saltonstall recalls Zorn’s portrait of George Peabody Gardner. Zorn’s portrait of Brook’s son-in-law became a companion to Sargent’s portrait of Eleanor painted before their marriage (fig. 38). Davis was a prominent member of society in Worcester, Massachusetts.74 He had his own likeness painted by Zorn. Its composition, showing him half-length against a simple background, with one hand on his hip and the other clasping gloves,

Fig. 37anders zornRichard Middlecott Saltonstall, 1899Oil on canvas, 150.5 × 91.5 cmMassachusetts Historic al Society, Boston

65

cm, private collection, and Edward Rathbone Bacon, 1897, oil on canvas, 122.6 × 89.5 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

76 John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Edward L. Davis and Her Son, Livingston Davis, 1890, oil on canvas, 218.8 × 122.6 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. See Hyland 1986, p. 38, and Ormond and Kilmurray 2002, no. 250.

77 20 February – 13 March 1899. Sargent’s Mrs. Davis and son was cat. 5, and the Brooks family portraits, cat. 2, 21, and 25.

78 Representative Works of Contemporary Swedish Artists, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Cincinnati Museum Association, the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Art Club, the Pratt Institute of Brooklyn, 1895–96. See Swanson 2004, chap. 2, pls. 5–6.

79 Jarzombek 2000.80 Swanson 2004, chapt. 2, pls. 5–6.81 See Philadelphia 1895–9682 Appendix 4, no. 25.83 Boston Daily Advertiser 1896.

was inspired by Zorn’s portraits of Adolphus Busch and Edward Rathbone Bacon exhibited at the St. Botolph Club.75 Zorn’s portrait of Davis complemented Sargent’s painting of his wife and their son.76 The Swede could have studied in person the abovementioned Davis and Brooks family portraits in Boston, just a couple of months before his exhibition, since they were included in Sargent’s major one-man show at Copley Hall.77

In 1896, between Zorn’s two solo shows, Bostonians got an opportunity to compare his work to other contemporary Swedish art in a travelling group exhi-bition curated by Zorn.78 The show was held at the Boston Art Club, which was among the city’s most important art venues.79 Nineteen Swedish painters were represented by almost one hundred paintings of different genres and subjects, ranging from the progressive to the more academic.80 The unidentified author of the introduction to the exhibition’s catalogue concluded that “the characteris-tics of keen and fresh observation and a new delight in nature both animate and inanimate are noticeable throughout the collection, and will make it stimulating in a remarkable degree to [American] eyes accustomed to the conventions of French and English art.”81

Zorn exhibited one of the largest groups of work, of which more than half were nudes in landscapes or interiors, and only two portraits. Before the opening of the show, he nervously wrote to Gardner, “Now the Swedish collection is coming to Boston—I pray of you be kind to it and tell the Bostonians how very fine it is please only the very top of contemporary art […] be good to me again and write and tell me no idiots in art appreciation in Boston.”82 The artist need not have worried. In the Boston press, Zorn was commended for organizing the exhibition and called “the leader of the contemporary painters of his country.”83

Zorn enjoyed a remarkable presence in Boston in the 1890s thanks to the ener-getic support of his close friend Isabella Stewart Gardner. His work was exhibited at the city’s most important art venues, and received wide and largely positive press coverage. He got commissions for portraits from Boston high society from both within and outside Gardner’s circle. That Zorn’s paintings still grace the walls of many public collections and private homes in the city and its environs is a testament to his success in the Hub.

Fig. 38 john singer sargentEleanor Brooks (later Mrs. Richard Middlecott Saltonstall), 1890Oil on canvas, 154.9 × 78.8 cmPrivate collection