(c) 2009 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

(c) 2022 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Travel Album: Spain, Volume I

author Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York, 1840 - 1924, Boston)

Date1888

Place MadeSpain, Europe

MediumBound album including collected photographs, found papers, and pen and ink annotations

Dimensions35.6 x 30.5 x 3.8 cm (14 x 12 x 1 1/2 in.)

ClassificationsBooks

Credit LineIsabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Accession numberv.1.a.4.15

eMuseum ID730582

EmbARK ObjectID17500

TMS Source ID5766

Last Updated8/9/24

Status

Not on view

Web CommentaryIsabella 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 album focuses primarily on her time in Madrid, with over fifty pages of photographs of her favorite works from Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado and Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando by artists such as Velázquez, Murillo, Titian, and Goya. 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.
Nathaniel Silver, "Isabella and the Hispanic Society," Inside the Collection (blog), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 13 October 2020, https://www.gardnermuseum.org/blog/isabella-and-hispanic-society
Diana Seave Greenwald, "John Singer Sargent, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Spain," Inside the Collection (blog), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2 August 2022, https://www.gardnermuseum.org/blog/john-singer-sargent-isabella-stewart-gardner-and-spain
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. 60-61.

Diana Seave Greenwald and Casey Riley (ed.). Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner's Travel Albums. Exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2023), pp. 70-77, 210, plates 9-12, no. 16.
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.

MarksNotesEmbossed in gold ink on the center of the front cover: I.S.G.
Inscribed in ink on the first page in Isabella Stewart Gardner's hand: "Las Espanas" Spain. / Isabella S. Gardner - Vol. I / 1888.