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(c) 2011 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
Travel Album: Spain and Portugal, Volume II
(c) 2011 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
(c) 2011 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Travel Album: Spain and Portugal, Volume II

author (New York, 1840 - 1924, Boston)
Date1888
Place MadeSpain, Europe
MediumBound album including collected photographs, found papers, and pen and ink annotations
Dimensions35.9 x 28.9 x 5.2 cm (14 1/8 x 11 3/8 x 2 1/16 in.)
ClassificationsBooks
Credit LineIsabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
Accession numberv.1.a.4.16
eMuseum ID722541
EmbARK ObjectID35163
TMS Source ID18468
Last Updated8/9/24
Status
Not on view
Web Commentary
Isabella Stewart Gardner kept records of her worldwide travels in the form of albums. In 1888, Isabella and Jack Gardner spent three months traveling throughout the Iberian Pennisula in Spain and Portugal. This is the second album from their trip and in it, Isabella introduces photographs of Spaniards among those of Spanish art and architecture.  The photographs of Spaniards that Gardner selected for this volume perform the stereotypes of Spanishness prevalent within her time, exposed through their dark skin and posed in typologies of traditional dress.
 
Her impressions of the country captured within her albums shaped the formation of her art collection and the very walls of her museum with the construction in 1914 of the Spanish Cloister to house John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo—the painterly embodiment of Sargent’s own trip to Spain.

BibliographyNotesRichard L. Kagan. The Spanish Craze: America's Fascination with the Hispanic World, 1779-1939 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), pp. 260 - 64
Madeleine Haddon. "'Spain Says It All' Isabella Stewart Gardner's 1888 Travel Albums of Spain" in Diana Seave Greenwald and Casey Riley (ed.). Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner's Travel Albums. Exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2023), pp. 54-69, fig. 6. 
Diana Seave Greenwald and Casey Riley (ed.). Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner's Travel Albums. Exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2023), pp. 78-91, 210, plates13-19, no. 17. 
Greta Llanes Serrano, "Leafing Through Isabella's Travel Album: Spain and Portugal, Volume II, 1888," Inside the Collection (blog), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 7 March 2023, https://www.gardnermuseum.org/blog/leafing-through-isabellas-travel-album-spain-and-portugal-volume-ii-1888
Madeleine Haddon,"Spain Says it All: Isabella Stewart Gardner's Travel Albums," Inside the Collection (blog), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 18 April 2023, https://www.gardnermuseum.org/blog/spain-says-it-all-isabella-stewart-gardners-travel-albums. 
MarksNotesInscribed in ink in Isabella Stewart Gardner's hand on the first page: Las Españas Spain / Isabella S. Gardner Vol. II / 1888
Embossed on the front cover in gold ink: I.S.G.