When in Boston, make sure you include a visit to ‘The Gardner’ as it is known locally. Conveniently situated on ‘The Fenway’, close to the MFA and the Back Bay area. It is a remarkable building and an extraordinary collection formed at the dawn of the era when Americans collected European art, and in the process created something entirely personal, new and exciting.

I met with Nathaniel Silver, Associate Director and Chief Curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, at Fenway Court, to discuss his own journey through the history of art collecting in America and the UK, and to hear about how Isabella Stewart Gardner formed and lived with her remarkable art collection, in her spectacular Venetian-style palazzo in Boston, Fenway Court. Nat is a co-author of a new biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner.

Thanks for reading Ornament ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Mrs Gardner was the first in America to buy a painting by the Florentine Renaissance master, Sandro Botticelli.

Photographs of Bernard Berenson (or ‘BB’ as he was known) and Isabella Stewart Gardner.

Rubens:

Rembrandt:

Soissons cathedral:

Titian:

After the spectacular opening of Fenway Court in 1903, Charles Eliot Norton, the Harvard art historian and friend of Mrs Gardner, wrote

“Palace and Gallery (there is no other word for it) are such an exhibition of the genius of a woman of wealth as never seen before. The building, of which she is the sole architect, is admirably designed. I know of no private collection in Europe which compares with this in the uniform level of the works it contains.” N. Silver and D. S. Greenwald, Isabella Stewart Gardner - A Life, 2022, p. 106.

Nat referred to three collections he likes to visit - all of which must have served as inspiration for Mrs Gardner’s collections and their display in Boston.

Nat’s chosen work is Pesellino’s, Story of David and Goliath, which with its pair, The Triumph of David, was included in the (very beautiful) recent exhibition at the National Gallery (December 2023-March 2024). Both panels may have been painted as decorative panels for the front of (two) marriage cassone. Prior to the exhibition’s opening, the panels were conserved at the National Gallery. The restorer Jill Dunkerton discussed their restoration here on The Art Newspaper’s podcast - (interview starts at 42:08).

See also The Isabella Stewart Gardner museum on Google Arts and Culture

Thanks for reading Ornament ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

On a recent trip to lecture in Boston, I had the great privilege to visit the home of Dr Horace Wood ‘Woody’ Brock. Woody was probably the first collector I ever met. Before I joined Christie’s as a graduate trainee in September 1997, I visited the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair, at the time the most important art fair in the Western hemisphere, a place where the international great and the good would visit to buy the best the world’s dealers had to offer. As I wandered around the fair, I walked onto the Asprey stand - probably the last fair Asprey’s attended - and inspected a rather elaborate English clock with superb gilt bronze mounts. I don’t remember the maker, but it was highly decorative. After a minute or two, I was approached by a tall, rather impressive figure in glasses, dressed immaculately in a dark chalk-stripe suit. He demanded - in his unmistakeable firm East Coast American tones - why I was interested in said clock. This had never happened to me, and I certainly wasn’t expecting anyone to take any notice of me. Was he, perhaps, more interested in my girlfriend who I had dragged along and was rather bemused by all of this? No, it seemed he was curious - insistent even - to know what I was doing with my life, where I had been to university, and which department I was to be joining at Christie’s. As I said that I was shortly to join the furniture department, he sensed a like-minded soul (and he was right). To my great surprise, I was invited to meet him later in the week for breakfast at Claridges, where I tried hard to keep up with his insistence that I will enjoy furniture - having never previously shown any interest in that direction. Woody was right of course, and it all changed after I joined Christie’s in September 1997 and found that I really did enjoy the study of 18th century furniture, which Woody considers in our discussion here, to be the zenith of great design of almost any age.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73, ‘Emperor’, 1992. Krystian Zimmerman (piano), Leonard Bernstein conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Some objects from Woody’s collection in US museums today:

Furniture presented by Woody to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where these superb pieces are beautifully displayed in a Regency-themed room.

Woody’s chosen object:

This month, I had the pleasure of meeting with Martin Levy, of the furniture dealers H. Blairman & Sons. Martin shared his experience of working in the family business, and helping to build art collections for private clients and institutions.

In this podcast episode, I sit down with my former colleague at the Royal Collection Trust Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures from 2005-2021. In this episode, we discuss the particular role of royal collectors, and if there is really a motivation for art collecting as a Prince and how that sometimes becomes a form of ‘national’ collecting (if there is such a thing). During my ten years working at the Royal Collection, Desmond and I worked closely on a range of curatorial matters: in particular exhibitions. The First Georgians (2014) was led by Desmond; likewise he led on Charles I at the Royal Academy ( 2018, with Per Rumberg), while I worked on the coeval exhibition on Charles II at The Queen’s Gallery (2017, with Martin Clayton). We also spent a lot of time thinking about ‘palace display’ - we both worked on the improving the appearance, picture hang and arrangement of furniture and objects in the State Apartments at Windsor Castle, all of which came under the broader ‘Future Programme’ project, which was mostly completed just prior to lockdown in March 2020.

In this, the second podcast episode of my occasional series of discussions with art world insiders, I visit the gallerist, Louis Meisel in New York, to discuss collecting American photo realism, works by the British ceramicist Clarice Cliff, vintage ice cream scoops and Playboy pin-up prints

The Louis K Meisel gallery, Prince Street, Soho, New York.

1. James Stourton. A new occasional podcast, with interviews about why we collect art. In this, the first interview, Rufus speaks with James Stourton, formerly of Sotheby's and a writer on collecting.