Object details
Object number
SOn3.a-b
Creator(s)
Title
Crest of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: C'est Mon Plaisir
Date
about 1900
Medium
Sandstone
Signatures, inscriptions, and markings
Inscribed (banner): CEST MON PLAISIR (it's my pleasure)
Provenance
Commissioned by Isabella Stewart Gardner from Sarah Wyman Whitman, Boston to design her seal with her motto "C'est Mon Plaisir" in about 1900.
Commentary
Isabella asked her friend, artist and writer Sarah Wyman Whitman to design this distinctive crest bearing a phoenix rising from the ashes, an emblem of immortality, and the phrase C’est Mon Plaisir (It’s My Pleasure), one of Isabella's mottoes and in the words of her biographer, "the reason and, in her opinion, the justification for her every action." It is installed above the museum’s former entryway on the north side of the building.
Bibliography
Morris Carter. Isabella Stewart Gardner and Fenway Court (Boston, 1925; Reprint, Boston, 1972), p. 188. (as designed by Isabella Stewart Gardner)
George L. Stout. Treasures from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, 1969), p. 41, ill.
Francis G. Hutchins. "Stained Glass Pragmatism: Sarah Wyman Whitman's Lowell Window at First Parish, Brookline, Massachusetts." First Parish Church in Brookline, website (2009), p. 2, n3. (as designed by Sarah Wyman Whitman, commissioned by Isabella Gardner)
Pieranna Cavalchini and Amanda Esteves-Kraus (eds.). Portrait (Boston, 2012), p. 25. (quoting the Diary of Willard T. Sears, 23 Nov. 1900; as "from a drawing made by Mrs. Whitman")
Shana McKenna, "Sarah Wyman Whitman: Artist and Advocate," Inside the Collection (blog), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 30 November 2020, https://www.gardnermuseum.org/blog/sarah-wyman-whitman-artist-and-advocate
Nathaniel Silver and Diana Seave Greenwald. Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life (Boston, 2022), pp. 71-72, fig. 37.
Gallery
Outside
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