The Original Isabella Stewart

Isabella Stewart Gardner was not—to quote the HBO series Game of Thrones—“the first of her name.” In fact, the name Isabella seems to have been handed down through the museum founder’s family. Genealogical records suggest it was her great-great grandmother’s first name, but we know for sure that there was at least one other notable Isabella in the family: her grandmother Isabella Tod (sometimes spelled Todd) Stewart.

An image of the elder Isabella, painted by no less than Thomas Sully—an American portraitist famous for having painted Queen Victoria—hangs in the Short Gallery across from Anders Zorn’s celebrated painting of the younger Isabella. Sully’s canvas shows a graceful woman with fair coloring and wearing an almost translucent bonnet. This painting, probably passed down to the younger Isabella’s father David Stewart and then to her, was a family heirloom and likely treasured by the founder. 

Recollections about Isabella’s relationship with her grandmother largely survive in the (somewhat undocumented and often unreliable) biographies written by Morris Carter (1925) and Louise Tharp (1965). Nonetheless, it is clear that Isabella loved her grandmother. Carter writes that, “The long summers spent on her grandmother’s Long Island farm were periods of great happiness, never to be forgotten.” The fact that Gardner not only kept the Sully portrait but also many of her grandmother’s possessions, like a music book and letters she received, also seems to suggest this affinity.

Isabella Tod was born into a notable Connecticut family that had arrived in the United States before the Revolutionary War, as documented in a handwritten genealogical chart held in the museum’s collection. She married James Stewart, who had immigrated from Scotland and the two settled in New York City. Stewart, however, died in 1813 when both he and his wife were only in their 30s. As a result, Isabella Tod Stewart was responsible for managing her own business affairs until her own death in 1848. 

After her husband passed away, she left New York City for the then-rural community of Jamaica, Queens in New York (then administratively a village on Long Island). Once there, she was a successful farm manager and a savvy real estate investor. There are even two silver vessels (one pitcher and one “tea mug”) in the collection that were presented to Isabella Tod Stewart by the Agricultural Society of New York, presumably for her accomplishments as a farmer.

While the two Isabella’s only knew one another for about eight years, the elder was clearly a role model for the younger. Isabella Tod was an independent and entrepreneurial woman able to successfully navigate her own life and fortune beginning roughly a century before women could vote. She would have likely been very proud of the woman her granddaughter and namesake grew up to be and the institution she founded. 

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