Skip to main content
Advanced Search
(c) 2021 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
Travel Album: France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Belgium, Volume I
(c) 2021 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
(c) 2021 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Travel Album: France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Belgium, Volume I

primary (New York, 1840 - 1924, Boston)
contributor (Pawtucket, Rhode Island, 1863 - 1950, Dublin, New Hampshire)
Date1894-1895
Place MadeEurope
MediumBound album including collected photographs, found papers, original watercolors, and pen and ink annotations
Dimensions32 x 20 x 4.5 cm (12 5/8 x 7 7/8 x 1 3/4 in.)
ClassificationsBooks
Credit LineIsabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
Accession numberv.1.b.4.4
Status
Not on view
Web CommentaryThe Gardners’ travels were focused on visiting Western Europe in the 1890s. This album includes original watercolors of Venice by Gardner’s friend, the American artist Joseph Lindon Smith (1863–1950), as well as pictures of the couple and their friends Emma and Anders Zorn floating in gondolas. The pages describing Gardner’s stopovers in Cannes and Rome—complete with menu—are typical of much of the content of her later travel albums, which documented return trips through Europe. While visits to Italy, Germany, France, and England were normally included in their earlier itineraries, this album suggests that Gardner treated these later trips as a chance to make plans for her own collection rather than just play tourist. She and her husband did not buy artworks directly while abroad, but the albums likely served as a reference for Gardner while considering paintings and sculptures her advisors proposed for acquisition. For example, she bought and pasted in a photograph of a work by Lucas Cranach (1472–1553) in a German museum collection; she later bought a very similar painting, Adam and Eve, on display in the Gothic Room.
Id726497
Last Updated8/9/24
EmbARK ObjectID25066
Source ID9173