PDF Summary:Chasing Beauty, by Natalie Dykstra

Isabella Stewart Gardner was one of the most distinctive art collectors of her era, assembling works by masters like Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Titian. But her vision extended beyond acquisition—she designed and built Fenway Court, a museum meant to immerse visitors in an emotional journey through art and history.

In Chasing Beauty, Natalie Dykstra examines how Gardner curated her collection and constructed her museum with careful intention. You'll learn about her innovative arrangement principles, which paired pieces from different cultures and time periods to create surprise and discovery. You'll also discover how Gardner used staging techniques like electric lighting and mirrors to enhance the viewer's experience, and how she ensured her vision would remain intact long after her death.

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Next, we'll look at how Gardner's vision ensured her museum remained unchanged following her passing.

Safeguarding the Vision

Isabella Stewart Gardner took steps to ensure her museum would remain unchanged after her death. She left an endowment to guarantee the museum's survival and stipulated in her will that it would bear her name and that the room configurations could not be changed. To preserve her vision, she also hired architectural photographers to capture every gallery.

(Shortform note: In The Past is a Foreign Country – Revisited, David Lowenthal explains that from the late 18th century, house-museum founders began to see their homes as self-portraits. They used endowments and will stipulations to preserve their room configurations, and they took photographs to capture their homes’ appearance. These efforts aimed to preserve their homes as they were, creating a lasting legacy for future generations.)

Exemplary Spaces and Thematic Displays

Staging, Arrangement, and Symbolic Choices

Gardner also carefully curated the staging and display of her items. She arranged her collection in an innovative way, drawing together both similar and contrasting pieces, including works by artists in various media and from different periods and countries. Dykstra notes that Gardner didn’t explain her choices because she wanted to evoke emotion and astonish the viewer, preferring an immersive experience to her specific interpretation. She encouraged people to consider it and draw their own conclusions.

Gardner’s staging was also enhanced by her use of electric light. For example, she placed ten footlights along the floor to illuminate Titian's Europa, enhancing the painting's own lighting. She added a sizable mirror to one side of the alcove, creating the impression of double the space. Nearby, brightly colored ceramic containers influenced by Muslim Spain rested on the floor, creating a magnificent effect.

The Impact of Electric Light and Mirrors on Human Perception

Gardner’s use of electric light and a mirror to enhance the display of Titian’s Europa would have had a powerful effect on visitors. Human vision is highly sensitive to light and reflection, and our brains are wired to pay special attention to these elements in our environment. The electric lamps would have created a dramatic contrast between light and shadow, drawing the eye to the painting and making the colors appear more vibrant. The mirror would have doubled the visual impact of the space, creating a sense of depth and expansiveness that would have made the alcove feel larger and more immersive. This combination of light and reflection would have created a visually stunning and emotionally engaging experience for visitors, making the display of Europa a highlight of Gardner’s collection.

The Vision of Isabella Stewart Gardner

We'll start by examining her process of creating the assortment.

Collecting the Artwork and Building the Court

Isabella Stewart Gardner meticulously curated her acquisitions and designed the Fenway Court Museum to fully engage visitors. Her collection included works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Titian, Botticelli, Raphael, and Matisse, plus a Roman floor mosaic depicting Medusa's head in the middle. Dykstra explains that Gardner's collection stood out because it included works from a range of countries, eras, and media. She organized the pieces in a way that would surprise and move visitors, rather than to express a particular interpretation. She designed the museum to create a blend of atmosphere and emotion, with a sequence of images and objects that would create a narrative for visitors to experience. She also incorporated rich colors, tiles, and fabrics into the galleries. Additionally, she was the sole U.S. collector of the period to have created and constructed a new building for publicly displaying her collection.

Sir John Soane’s Museum

Gardner’s approach to displaying her collection was innovative, but she wasn’t the first collector to use the arrangement of artworks to shape visitors’ feelings. In the early 19th century, British architect Sir John Soane transformed his London home into a museum, filling it with a diverse array of antiquities, architectural fragments, paintings, and mirrors. According to Sir John Soane's Museum, London by Tim Knox, Soane’s house was conceived not as a neutral backdrop to a collection but as a single, total work of art, in which the architecture, the route through the rooms, and the extraordinarily dense layering of antiquities, architectural fragments, casts, paintings, and mirrors were all orchestrated to produce a carefully staged sequence of views and sensations, so that visitors were led through a highly charged, almost theatrical visual drama in which surprise, compression and release, darkness and sudden light were used to instruct, delight, and emotionally unsettle them rather than to display the objects in any sober or systematic order.