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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Surrounded by the artists, writers and musicians who made up her court in Boston as they did in Venice, Isabella Stewart Gardner, a passionate art collector, was as revered and sought after as royalty. Henry James was inspired by the rich and powerful Gardner, as well as by the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, when he wrote his novel The Wings of the Dove. Gardner was to recreate a larger-than-life version of Palazzo Barbaro in Boston, which is now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.These dazzling letters bring to life James's passion for Venice and the Palazzo Barbaro, and serve as an introduction to the fascinating world of Isabella Stewart Gardner herself.
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HENRY JAMES
LETTERS TO ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER
EDITED BY ROSELLA MAMOLI ZORZI
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
It is quite astonishing that in the gold mine of letters1 written by American novelist Henry James (1843–1916), many of those he wrote to Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) should still be unpublished and uncollected.
This astonishment derives from the fame of the writer, but also from that of his addressee, Isabella Stewart Gardner, a very wealthy New Yorker, who married an equally wealthy Bostonian banker, John Lowell Gardner, Jr (1837–98), in 1860. She was the creator of one of the most important museums in the United States, Fenway Court, or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston, which opened with a gala on 1st January 1903, and to the public on 23rd February.
Mrs Gardner, often judged in the Boston newspapers and in more conservative society as an eccentric figure—which she probably enjoyed being—letting all sorts of ‘legends’ grow around her,2 was surrounded by a ‘court’ of musicians, painters, novelists who revered and flattered her. John Singer Sargent caught the aura of her great power in his famous portrait of 1888, where Mrs Gardner, in a long black dress by the famous Paris couturier Worth, is shown exhibiting the signs of her wealth—she wears the purest pearls around her neck and waist, rubies attached to the pearls, and rubies glitter also on her black silk slippers. The motif of the golden background seems to crown her within a sort of holy nimbus, symbol of power, while her beautiful white neck and arms underline her feminine attractiveness.3 In another famous portrait, of 1894, the Swedish painter Anders Zorn caught her extraordinary vitality, painting her as she stepped into the salon of the Palazzo Barbaro, the magnificent Venetian palace which Mrs Gardner rented more than once from its owners, Daniel and Ariana Curtis, while the moonlight shines in the background over the Grand Canal, and her open arms and hands are reflected in the window panes. The Venetian setting is highly significant, as the Barbaro was certainly an important inspiration for Isabella’s Fenway Court—her lasting creation—where the simple exterior of the building hides a Venetian courtyard, where Gothic windows, partly original ones, look out into a space rich in Roman mosaics, sculptures, statues4 and flowers.
“Dearest Queen”, “Chère charmeuse”, “Dear signora Isabella donna”, “Dear Queen Isabella”,5 are some of the different ways in which friends of both sexes addressed Mrs Gardner in their letters, in adoring tones of absolute admiration. Isabella was respected, admired and flattered in her different decisions and actions, just like a queen.
Henry James’s letters to her are different—they are full of admiration, but they manage to keep a distance, to proclaim the writer’s independence in saving his precious time from too imposing and pressing invitations.6 James’s affection and esteem for Mrs Gardner are sincere and intense and become stronger and stronger as the years go by; the novelist recognizes openly Mrs Gardner’s vitality and power, but he does not obey possible ‘orders’, even if this can be seen as a lack of faithfulness in their friendship: what is most important for James, in spite of his, at times, hectic social life, is the possibility of having time to devote to his writing, the real ‘felicity’ of his life.
In the spring of 1884, Mrs Gardner is approaching Europe and Venice by way of the Suez Canal after a one-year voyage around the world—the Gardners left Boston on 21st May 1883, and crossed the continent to San Francisco, from which they sailed aboard the City of Tokio on 29th May, to Japan, China, Cambodia, Java, India, and, via Aden and Cairo, to Crete, Zante, and finally Brindisi and Venice.7 She expects to find James in Venice in May 1884, having written to him from Agra, the seat of the splendid Taj Majal, but her correspondent writes to her that he will not be there (letter 27). After almost throwing at her face her great power—“You have everything, you do everything, you enjoy everything”—James admits to broken vows, smashed promises, necessary, however, to save something even more valuable than friendship—his own writing. He declares that he knows too well she will not miss him, in her “preposterously pleasant career”, and presents himself with the image of the “poor patient beast”, developing to its utmost this metaphor and contrasting his own life of hard work with that of the lady travelling from the temples of Kyoto to Shanghai, from La Sonnambula in Java to the mountains of Shimla, enjoying life. But he will not join the crowd in spoiling her, as he is a real friend.
A tender irony allows James to save himself from becoming one of Mrs Gardner’s courtiers, even if he enjoys a very intense relationship with her, as demonstrated by how often he sent her his books, on one occasion asking her to correct some misprints in one of his essays (letter 23), and by writing to her about his plays (letters 13–16, 21–22, 49) which he vainly hoped would make him as famous as his contemporary Oscar Wilde.
Mrs Gardner loves going to the theatre just as James loves the stage as a place of possible success—they go to the theatre together or James gives advice on something he saw, in particular the plays performed in Boston in 1883 by the Italian actor Salvini, about whose performance in Othello James is quite enthusiastic, even if he finds it odd that audiences should accept Shakespeare spoken in Italian by the great star, and in English by the rest of the company.8
The world encompassed in these letters is vast, in space and time. It includes two continents, Europe and America, since Mrs Gardner and James see each other on both sides of the Atlantic and correspond across its waters; but it also includes the Far East, where Mrs Gardner is traveling in 1883–84, and where other friends of both Mrs Gardner’s and James’s are, such as Percy Lowell or William Sturgis Bigelow; India, which the Gardners visit from north to south and where the Curtises announce they will go (letter 49); the West Indies and the South Sea islands, where Charles Robarts has some official post (letter 33). Reading these letters one realizes how much, how often and how far James’s circle and generation travelled. Even the Fiji islands were part of their routes, not only for Robert Louis Stevenson but also for Henry Adams. If British friends travel in the British Empire, American friends seem not to have forgotten the Pacific Ocean whaling routes of their New England forebears.
The letters cover a wide space in time—they span a period of more than thirty years, from 1879 to 1914, a period full of world events, some of which appear in the letters—the Cuban war of 1898 (letter 67), which is a subject amply treated in its menacing power by Henry in his correspondence with his brother William, the famous psychologist and philosopher; echoes of “economic & labour convulsions, rumours of revolution & war” (letter 98) in 1911, announcing the coal strikes of 1912, which left “a couple of million people” out of work, “a number that will be hugely swelled if it goes on much longer”,9 in James’s words; there are no letters for 1900, therefore neither the death of Queen Victoria nor the Boer War, which “drags its daily gloom along”10 in Henry James’s letters to William and other friends, are present.
One letter shows clearly on which side James was in a case that inflamed public opinion, the famous Dreyfus affair, where the trial leading to the condemnation to forced labour in 1894 of a Jewish French officer charged with treason was re-opened thanks to a famous article by Emile Zola, J’accuse, in 1898 (letter 69).
Among the great events of the century there was the 1893 Chicago World Columbian Exposition, to which the Gardners were invited, having lent a painting, and where Mrs Gardner saw The Omnibus, a picture by Anders Zorn. She bought the painting, and later invited the Zorns to Palazzo Barbaro, where the Swedish painter created Isabella’s wonderful portrait. James imagines Mrs Gardner going to the Exposition, with her own building, a “more barbarous Barbaro”, all of her own, among the Federal and the State buildings (letter 56).
The last letter, dated 20th April 1914, closes the correspondence, leaving out the great tragedy that made “the whole country” “a huge workshop of war”, a few months later, bringing a “tremendous strain”.11
People and letters cross the ocean, Mrs Gardner and James see each other in London, in Paris, in Venice, but also on the other shore of the Atlantic, in the various homes of Mrs Gardner, at Beacon Street in Boston, at Beverly on the Massachusetts coast, at Green Hill, in Brookline, near Boston.
Several letters allow us to enter the intense and private world of the deepest family affections—James writes to Mrs Gardner a particularly intense and moving letter on the death of his mother (letter 12), other letters regard other family losses—the death of Alice (1848–92)—letter 50, James’s sister who died of cancer after a lifetime of psychological invalidism, and of William (1842–1910)—letter 92—his closest brother.
To Mrs Gardner James writes with great sympathy and affection after the sudden death of her husband on 10th December 1898 (letter 68).
Other personal losses and private tragedies are not recorded or only hinted at: there is no word on the suicide of Mrs Gardner’s nephew, Joe Gardner,12on 16th October 1886, while there is an obscure reference to the suicide of Edith Story Peruzzi’s son Bindo13 in 1907 (letter 88), both perhaps linked to the persecution of homosexuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; there is no letter covering the period of Oscar Wilde’s trial in April 1895, on which James wrote to his brother William: “You ask of Oscar Wilde. His fall is hideously tragic—& the squalid violence of it gives him an interest (of misery) that he never had for me—in any degree—before. Strange to say he may have a ‘future’—of a sort—by reaction—when he comes out of prison—if he survives the horrible sentence of hard labour that he will probably get. His trial begins today—however—& it is too soon to say.”14 Other private tragedies are mentioned in the letters, such as the suicide of the common friend Ellen Hooper Gurney in 1887; if James’s sister Alice’s illness is mentioned (letters 45–47),15 no hint appears of the alcoholism and psychological weakness of their younger brother Robertson, mentioned in letter 78.
Across these wide spaces and dramatic times a varied world of artists, writers, public figures, mutual friends crop up.
Amazingly few letters allude to the works of art bought by Mrs Gardner, and to her final creation, the museum.
The almost total lack of references to art and art collecting in these letters does not allow us to see what James thought of Mrs Gardner’s collection or of her purchases. The exception is the multiple mention of Titian’s Rape of Europa, which was offered to her by Bernard Berenson. James commented on Mrs Gardner’s acquisition of this painting in the course of 1898, merging with some irony the image of the buyer with that of the mythical figure (letter 65: ‘incredible woman!—I mean both of you’), asking for more pictures of the painting (letter 66), finally imagining that Europa’s fluttering purple scarf could bandage successfully Mrs Gardner’s hurt back (letter 67).
He did imagine Mrs Gardner returning from Europe to her museum-home, in 1899, thinking of her in her “pictured halls”, and as a figure in a “cinquecento tapestry” (letter 75), mentioning then in another letter her “recent splendid history & accomplished glory” (letter 76).
However, there are no other references to art purchases in the letters to Mrs Gardner which have come down to us. We must look elsewhere to try and understand James’s opinion on the pervasive passion for art collecting of which Mrs Gardner was such an important representative in a period which witnessed the creation of other great American collections, such as those of J Pierpont Morgan, the Havemeyers, Henry Clay Frick, the Cone sisters and many others.
James was distinctly aware of this imposing phenomenon, linked to the making of huge fortunes in the fields of coal, railways, steel, sugar, shares and banking—those of the so-called ‘Robber Barons’, linked to the influence of aestheticism in the USA and to the rising culture of consumerism as theorized by Theodor Veblen in his well-known Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Several of James’s works of fiction dealing with collectors and collecting show how aware James was of all this, from the early stories Adina and The Last of the Valerii, to The Portrait of a Lady (1881), with its great European houses and the characters of the collectors, to The Spoils of Poynton (1896), a novel based exclusively on the passion and danger of collecting, The Golden Bowl (1904), a late novel presenting an American collector, and The Outcry (1911), a novel reflecting the debate over the right of England to sell its masterpieces to America.
In James’s fiction the image of the collector and the passion for collecting is never totally positive. Is James’s silence on Mrs Gardner’s passion for art a sign of a negative attitude? We must turn to other sources to find an answer.
An unequivocally negative comment is to be found in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton, written from Lamb House on 24th–28th November 1899:
I have presently to take on myself a care that may make you smile, nothing less than to proceed, a few moments hence, toDover, to meet our celebrated friend (I think she can’t not be yours) Mrs. Jack Gardner, who arrives from Brussels, charged with the spoils of the Flemish school.16
The choice of “spoils” for Mrs Gardner’s acquisition of “all her Van Eycks and Rubenses” which James “must help her to disembark” and see through the customs at Dover, leaves no doubt on James’s negative judgement: The Spoils of Poynton had been published three years earlier.
But no mention of Mrs Jack’s “spoils” is present in the letter written by James to Mrs Jack about this very arrival.
James’s negative view of art acquisitions across the Atlantic comes up with great force as early as 1876, a period in which James was writing ‘art reports’ for the Atlantic Monthly and a few other journals and newspapers. In an article published in the New York Tribune in January 1876, the novelist wrote a series of comments on The American Purchase of Meissonnier’s Friedland by a New Yorker, Mr A T Stewart. In this article, James, the frequenter of museums and galleries, the lover of art, the writer influenced by British aestheticism, the novelist and short-story writer who used a high number of works of art in his works, showed that he was well aware of the power of the market that had developed in those years, and he used a metaphor that seems to hover over his subsequent literary production.
James wrote:
the picture [Meissonnier’s Friedland] has been bought by Mr. A.T. Stewart of New York for the prodigious sum, as I see it, of 380,000 francs. The thing is exceedingly clever, but it strikes me as the dearest piece of goods I ever had the honour of contemplating.17
One takes … an acute satisfaction in seeing America stretch out her long arm and rake in, across the green cloth of the wide Atlantic, the highest prizes of the game of civilization.18
[my emphasis]
If the statement seems an appreciation (“One takes … an acute satisfaction”), the metaphor that follows undermines the positive quality of the statement. James used the metaphor of a gambler, playing on a billiard table extending from America to Europe (“the green cloth of the wide Atlantic”), “rak[ing] in” the most precious products of civilization. The obtaining of these prizes seems to be the casual, unmerited result of a gambling game, not of work.
A well-known later comment in James’s Notebooks on “The Americans looming up—dim, vast, portentous—in their millions—like gathering waves—the barbarians of the Roman Empire”19 (15th July 1895), coming immediately after a reference to the “Age of Mrs Jack”, seems to underline James’s horror of the grabbing hands of the moneyed American collectors. Was this “age of Mrs Jack”, of the Fricks, the Morgans, the Havemeyers buying Titian’s Europa, Holbein’s Thomas More, illuminated medieval manuscripts, dozens of French impressionists, was this age the age of the “Barbarians”?
None of these negative comments is echoed in James’s final judgement on Mrs Gardner’s museum, as expressed in The American Scene (1907), the book on America written after a European absence of twenty years.
… no impression of the new Boston can feel itself hang together without remembrance of what it owes to that rare exhibition of the living spirit lately achieved, in the interest of the fine arts, and of all that is noble in them, by the unaided and quite heroic genius of a private citizen. To attempt to tell the story of the wonderfully-gathered and splendidly-lodged Gardner Collection would be to displace a little the line that separates private from public property …
It is in the presence of the results magnificently attained, the energy triumphant over everything, that one feels the fine old disinterested tradition of Boston least broken.20
This comment comes at the end of a chapter devoted to Boston and the disappearance of the old Boston, both in terms of architecture (houses torn down) and inhabitants (replaced by the “alien”, or immigrants, especially Italian), indicating the obliteration of history—and memory—that James found in Boston as in New York.
The “new” Boston, where everything was too big, too new, too destructive of the past, does have a great gem: the collection of Isabella Stewart Gardner, the collection of a New York lady elevated to the honorary rank of a Bostonian, to the “fine old disinterested tradition of Boston”.
The achievement of one woman collector found its utmost celebration in the words of a writer who was one of the sharpest critics of his home country and of the tycoon-collectors of art of his times in his fictional works.
ROSELLA MAMOLI ZORZI
NOTES
1 The total number of extant letters by Henry James is 10,423; in spite of the different collections, starting with the four pioneering volumes edited by Leon Edel, only a fraction of this number has been published. The huge and wonderful project of The Complete Letters of Henry James has started with volumes I and II, 1855–1872, edited by Pierre A Walker and Greg W Zacharias Introduction by Alfred Habegger Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 2006. For the number of letters, see vol I p lxviii.
2 On the legends of Mrs Gardner going around with a lion on a leash and such like, see Shand-Tucci pp 25–27 and Chong Gondola Days.
3 On the portrait, painted in December 1887 and January 1888, at Mrs Gardner’s 152 Beacon Street house, in nine sittings, see Ormond-Kilmurray The Early Portraits pp 209–11. For the late watercolours, Mrs Gardner at Fenway Court (probably 1903) and Mrs Gardner in White (1922), see Ormond-Kilmurray 2003 no 442 p 100 and no 586 pp 251–52. See also Bourget’s description in Outre-Mer (1895) pp 147–48. On Sargent and James, see Sargent’s Venice.
4 On the collections, see Goldfarb and Eye of the Beholder.
5 These expressions, for instance, were used by Ralph Curtis, painter, son of the owners of the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, and Mrs Bronson, an American who lived in Venice and Asolo, and a friend of Robert Browning, who sent Mrs Gardner a lock of the poet’s hair.
6 See also Edel Conquest of London p 380.
7 All references to Mr and Mrs Gardner’s travels are based on their travel diaries and scrapbooks, courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Boston. For excerpts of Mrs Gardner’s letters from the Orient, see Carter pp 59–86.
8Scenic Art p 170.
9 Letter to T S Perry of 21st March 1912 p 338.
10The Correspondence of William James, William and Henry III p 101.
11 Letter to Thomas S Perry 15th January 1915 p 347.
12 See Shand-Tucci pp 82–84.
13 See Lawrence pp 1–20.
14The Correspondence of William James, William and Henry II p 359 (letter of 26th April 1895, the day on which Wilde’s trial began, finishing on 25th May, with the imprisonment of Wilde).
15 For Alice James, see Edel Diary of Alice James, and Strouse.
16 Edel Letters IV p 124.
17Painter’s Eye p 108.
18 Ibid p 108.
19Notebooks p 126. For a wider analysis of James’s Notebooks and letters with regard to collecting and Isabella Stewart Gardner, see my essay in Power Underestimated: American Women Art Collectors Proceedings of the International Conference organized by the Frick Collection and the University of Venice April 2008. On collecting, see also Before Peggy Guggenheim, Cagidemetrio, Francescato, Perosa.
20American Scene p 255.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Of the hundred letters presented here, eighty-three have never been published in English (they were all published in my Italian translation for Archinto, in Milan, 2004). Of the seventeen previously published, more precisely: four letters (21, 55, 64, 98) were published by Percy Lubbock; ten (6, 10, 11, 12, 22, 23, 43, 49, 54, 74—this last one also by Morris Carter) by Leon Edel; three (27, 42, 59) by myself.
The indication ‘Ms I S G M’ below the letter number means ‘Manuscript, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’; ‘Lubbock’, ‘Edel’ and ‘Mamoli Zorzi’ refer to the letters published by these editors (see Bibliography).
My transcriptions are those of the manuscripts (with the exception of two typed letters, dictated by James) preserved at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Transcriptions are as faithful as possible to the original letters: for example, dates are transcribed in the irregular ways James used; italics indicate words underlined once by James; words with one underlining were underlined twice, or three times, by James; abbreviations are kept the way James wrote them. However, no indication is given of deleted words in the letters.
I have been helped in deciphering some difficult words by Philip Horne, University College London, by Tamara Follini, Clare College Cambridge, and by Pierre Walker, Salem State College, whom I would like to thank for their repeated generosity in my work on Jamesian texts; Clara Kozol’s transcriptions made for the Museum and her dating of some letters have been of great help, as has her essay Henry James and Mrs Gardner: A New Perspective, in Fenway Court Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Boston 1973 pp 2–9. Of course any possible mistake in the transcriptions is mine.
Jack Gardner’s unpublished diaries, Mrs Gardner’s scrapbooks and guestbooks, held at the Museum, have been very useful.
ROSELLA MAMOLI ZORZI
HENRY JAMES, MRS GARDNER AND ART
Henry James and Isabella Gardner were bound together in innumerable ways—by a shared social circle stretching from Boston to London and Venice, a love of theatre and music, an interest in gossip and a devotion to attractive young men.1 And they were both devoted to Italy, Venice especially. But most profoundly, they both loved art. This passion is not well illuminated in their surviving correspondence, leaving us to speculate on their discussions and to consider their common modes of thinking, conducted in very different ways and often from afar.
In one of James’s earliest letters to Gardner (2 of 1879), he provided her with the address of the painter Edward Burne-Jones and a recommendation: “his things are very interesting (I think, at least)”. And in a review from about the same time, James singled out the artist for praise.2 We do not know if Isabella actually visited the artist, but she bought nothing by him. Indeed at this time, Isabella could hardly be called a collector at all. She owned, by this date, paintings by Charles-Émile Jacque and Narcisse-Virgile Diaz, and at this early period bought modest works from local Boston galleries—furnishings common in American upper-class residences.
Henry James, however, was intimately familiar with the contemporary art scene, in part through the many reviews he was writing in the 1870s. He played a crucial role in introducing Isabella to the lively world of art exhibitions in London and Paris in 1879 and through the 1880s. More important, James introduced Isabella to artists, and from this point in time, she surrounded herself with artists, socialized with them, befriended them and bought work directly from them. Indeed, James can be credited with initiating what would become an all-consuming passion for Isabella.
Burne-Jones’s address was just one of many such introductions. An especially important event was a party at the Grosvenor Gallery on 21st July 1879, when Isabella first met James McNeill Whistler.3 The gallery’s third summer exhibition included works by Whistler. Henry James, Henry Adams, and Jack and Isabella all went to the reception.4 In September of the same year James accompanied the Gardners to Paris.
Isabella and James had very different opinions of Whistler’s work, one of many examples where their taste diverged. In 1878, James described the Ruskin- Whistler trial, and characterized Whistler’s work: “Unfortunately, Mr. Whistler’s productions are so very eccentric and imperfect (I speak here of his paintings only; his etchings are quite another affair, and altogether admirable) …”5 Isabella was much more enthusiastic. In October 1886, she bought a small painting and two pastels, including a portrait of herself. In the 1890s, she acquired numerous etchings as well as two landscape paintings. In the mid-1890s there was even discussion of her acquiring Whistler’s famous Peacock Room for the Boston Public Library, although nothing came of the idea.
Henry James’s most significant act of mediation was introducing Isabella to John Sargent in 1886. Sargent’s Madame X (Metropolitan Museum of Art) had taken Paris by storm, and James arranged a private viewing of the scandalous portrait in the privacy of the artist’s studio (letter 31). Enthusiastic about Sargent’s painting, James had quickly befriended the artist. In 1887, James published an insightful appraisal of Sargent’s work in Harper’s Magazine where he commented on Madame X as well as on paintings that had made their way to Boston, including the Portrait of the Boit Children (Museum of Fine Arts) and El Jaleo (now in the Gardner Museum).6 Isabella would undoubtedly have met Sargent with or without James, especially since the artist came to Boston in 1887 to paint society portraits of many of Isabella’s friends. But her enthusiasm was certainly stoked by James, who made sure that she was familiar with the range of Sargent’s work. Indeed the novelist seems to have guided her approach to working artists. In Boston, Sargent painted a remarkable portrait of Mrs Gardner, but its unusual pose and background are as much her creation as his. She clearly desired a portrait that would make a splash—that would seem unique, if not actually as controversial as the sensuous display of flesh in Madame X. James described Sargent’s portrait of Isabella without having seen it, calling it (appropriately) a “Byzantine Madonna with a halo”.7
But even with Sargent, James and Gardner parted ways. El Jaleo, exhibited at the Salon of 1882, was not to James’s liking:
It looks like life, but it looks also, to my view, rather like a perversion of life, and has the quality of an enormous ‘note’ or memorandum, rather than of a representation … ‘El Jaleo’ sins, in my opinion, in the direction of ugliness and, independently of the fact that the heroine is circling round incommoded by her petticoats, has a want of serenity.8
Isabella could not have disagreed more. The painting had been purchased by a relative of Jack Gardner’s, T Jefferson Coolidge, who brought it to Boston. Isabella craved it, apparently for decades; in 1914, she created an entire gallery to display El Jaleo in an evocative manner, and she succeeded in obtaining the painting as a gift.
Isabella Gardner in turn seems to have inspired Henry James—she can perhaps be glimpsed in various characters, although the connection is always obtuse and based on transformed details of personality and habit. James’s notebooks explicitly record Isabella, not always in a flattering way. In 1895, struck by the “insane frenzy of futile occupation imposed by the London seasons”, he imagined a character based on Isabella—“the age of Mrs Jack, the figure of Mrs Jack”.9 Did James associate Gardner with activity lacking serious thought? On other occasions James marvelled at her energy—in 1892 she acquired chairs from the Borghese collection: “The little lady is of an energy! She showed me yesterday at Carrer’s her seven glorious chairs (the loveliest I ever saw); but they are not a symbol of her attitude—she never sits down.”10
The same year in Venice, Gardner commissioned portraits of herself and Jack from the Viennese artist, Ludwig Passini. Katharine Bronson gave a large dinner party for the Gardners, and James had the opportunity to talk to Passini. The artist remarked that the Empress Frederick of Germany knew exactly how to pose for a portrait, and James conceived the idea that since aristocrats had posed for artists their entire lives, even deposed royalty would never lose that particular skill. The story has a cruel edge to it since Passini’s portrait of Isabella is awkward in the extreme, and James must have been struck by Isabella’s failure to pose well for a portrait. Passini’s portrait does not survive and may have been destroyed by Isabella.11
