From Tourist To Collector

Spring 2009 During 1914 and 1915 Mrs. Gardner created a private subterranean chamber known as the Buddha Room (or Chinese Room) at Fenway Court, which possessed an atmospheric, evocative arrangement of Buddhist statues, altar tables, temple ornaments, and decorative screens. This exhibition will attempt to recreate that space, as part of a broader examination of Gardner’s lifelong fascination with Asian art and culture.

The exhibition will also contain several of Isabella Gardner’s elaborately ornate and remarkably revealing travel scrapbooks compiled on her travels, among other objects. Many of the books contain scenic photographs, postcards, handwritten notes, pressed flowers and leaves, and souvenirs or mementos, amidst notes about the places, people and flora she encountered. One book, from Egypt, even contains watercolor drawings and sketches by Gardner herself.

From Tourist to Collector is the Gardner Museum’s first, though long-planned historic exhibition dedicated to Isabella Gardner’s travel scrapbooks. Extremely adventurous (Isabella Gardner was the first American woman to travel to Cambodia, where she rode an oxcart through the jungle), Isabella Gardner was also extremely interested daily life, culture, politics, and landscape in the places she visited, which is conveyed in these books through store-bought postcards, photographs by local artists, drawings, watercolors, even pressed flowers and leaves she cut and pasted into the pages of her scrapbooks. The archives contain 30 scrapbooks, in addition to diaries Isabella Gardner kept with more detailed narratives about her travels.

Between 1883 and 1884, she traveled throughout the Orient, compiling five scrapbooks along the way. Each of the Isabella Gardner’s five scrapbooks from her trip to Asia in 1883-4 will be part of this exhibition: 1883 Japan (v.1.a./4.6); 1883 Japan, China (v.1.a./4.7); Cambodia, Java (now part of Indonesia), Malaya (now part of Malaysia), Saigon (Vietnam), Singapore (v.1.a./4.9); 1883 China (v.1.a./4.8); and India (v.1.a./4.l0)

This exhibition represents the first time these books will have been on view together to the public. The museum’s 2003 Centennial exhibition, The Making of the Museum showcased one of her travel scrapbooks from Japan and another from Venice, Italy; and the summer 2008 exhibition, Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008 showed one page from her 1883 China scrapbook (v.1.a./4.8). -- www.gardnermuseum.org

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