Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York, 1840 - 1924, Boston)
Travel Album: Spain, Volume I , 1888
Bound album including collected photographs, found papers, and pen and ink annotations , 35.6 x 30.5 x 3.8 cm (14 x 12 x 1 1/2 in.)
General admission for children 17 years and under is always free
Vatichino
Commentary
Isabella Stewart Gardner kept records of her worldwide travels in the form of albums. In 1888, Isabella and Jack Gardner spent three months traveling throughout the Iberian Pennisula in Spain and Portugal. This album focuses primarily on her time in Madrid, with over fifty pages of photographs of her favorite works from Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado and Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando by artists such as Velázquez, Murillo, Titian, and Goya. Her impressions of the country captured within her albums shaped the formation of her art collection and the very walls of her museum with the construction in 1914 of the Spanish Cloister to house John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo—the painterly embodiment of Sargent’s own trip to Spain.