Art: PUBLIC FAVORITE IN A PALACE

JOHN SINGER SARGENT’S flickering, passionate portrayal of a Spanish dancer (opposite) is the popular favorite at the nation’s most personal great museum. The museum was conceived and built by a wild, plain-faced little redhead named Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924). She has been called the “Improper Bostonian No. 1.”

Isabella Gardner inherited millions of dollars from her father (a Manhattan importer) and millions more from her husband, John Lowell Gardner, who was a pillar of Boston society. She enjoyed the money. Young “Mrs. Jack” buffaloed Boston by such antics as strolling down Tremont Street with a lion on a leash, and high balling to a North Shore party at the throttle of a chartered locomotive. Once, when asked to contribute to “The Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary,” she remarked that she was not aware of a charitable eye or ear in Boston. Henry Adams described the effect of a chat with her as “absolute vertigo.”

John Singer Sargent painted Mrs. Jack again and again, helped give her an intimate appreciation of art. In middle age she sponsored a curlylocked student named Bernard Berenson, saw him through Harvard and off to Italy, and entrusted him with a proud mission: to help build a first-rate collection of old masters. (He stayed on in Florence to become the world’s foremost authority on Renaissance art.) At the turn of the century, Mrs. Jack started construction of an Italian palace in the marshes on the outskirts of Boston. Already in her 60s, she joined workmen on the job, employed a cornetist to summon her foremen for conferences.

New Year’s night, 1903, Boston society was invited to see the results of Mrs. Jack’s labors. They found the palace as crammed with art treasures as that of a Renaissance prince. Mrs. Jack kept adding to the collection until her death, delighted in hanging such beloved contemporaries as Sargent cheek by jowl with the great masters. Sargent’s El Jaleo (an Andalusian dance) occupies a specially constructed Moorish alcove in the palace’s “Spanish Cloister,” is illuminated by footlights concealed behind potted greenery.

By the terms of Mrs. Jack’s will, the Italian palace remains much as it was. Fresh flowers are placed under some of the pictures each day. Some 100,000 visitors enjoy the museum each year yet its atmosphere is one of private enjoyment.’