Object details
Object number
v.1.a.4.2
Creator(s)
Title
Travel Album: Egypt and Sudan
Date
1874-1875
Medium
Bound album including collected photographs, found papers, original watercolors, and pen and ink writings
Description
125 pages
Dimensions
30.2 x 24 x 4.5 cm (11 7/8 x 9 7/16 x 1 3/4 in.)
Commentary
Isabella Stewart Gardner was an avid traveler who chronicled her journeys in twenty-eight photographic albums between 1867 and 1896. This scrapbook reveals her discovery of historic landscapes and cultural traditions along the Nile River in Egypt. Gardner took great care in designing the pages of her albums, and within them we can find traces of her earliest inspirations in creating her museum. The watercolor sketch of a mosque prefigures the crenellations lining her museum’s courtyard walls.
Bibliography
Joyce L. Haynes. "The Sacred Beetle." Fenway Court (1973), pp. 30-34, nos. 1-2, ill. 34.
Hilliard Goldfarb and Susan Sinclair. Isabella Stewart Gardner: Woman and the Myth. Exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1994), pp. 8-9, ill.
Alan Chong and Noriko Murai. Journeys East: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Asia. Exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2009), pp. 14, 17-18, 60-61, figs. 2, 3, 5, 12, 13.
Lawrence M. Berman. "Aboard the Ibis: The Gardners' Nile Voyage, 1874-75" in Alan Chong and Noriko Murai (eds.). Inventing Asia: American Perspectives Around 1900. Fenway Court, vol. 33 (Boston, 2014), pp. 62-84.
Casey Riley. From Page To Stage: Isabella Stewart Gardner's Travel Albums and the Development of her Museum 1874-1924. PhD diss. (Boston University: Boston, 2015).
Stacy Perman. "Diary of a Somebody". Patek Philippe (Vol. 3, no. 12, 2015), pp. 44-49, ill.
Kathleen A. Foster. American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent. Exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2017), pp. 24-25, fig. 15.
Nathaniel Silver and Diana Seave Greenwald. Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life (Boston, 2022), pp.45-48 , fig. 20.
Diana Seave Greenwald and Casey Riley (ed.). Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner's Travel Albums. Exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2023), pp. 38-41, 206, plate 3-4, no. 3.
Gallery
Vatichino
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