Object details
Accession number
v.1.a.4.16
Primary Creator
Full title
Travel Album: Spain and Portugal, Volume II
Creation Date
1888
Marks
Inscribed in ink in Isabella Stewart Gardner's hand on the first page: Las Españas Spain / Isabella S. Gardner Vol. II / 1888Embossed on the front cover in gold ink: I.S.G.
Dimensions
35.9 x 28.9 x 5.2 cm (14 1/8 x 11 3/8 x 2 1/16 in.)
Display Media
Bound album including collected photographs, found papers, and pen and ink annotations
Web 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 is the second album from their trip and in it, Isabella introduces photographs of Spaniards among those of Spanish art and architecture. The photographs of Spaniards that Gardner selected for this volume perform the stereotypes of Spanishness prevalent within her time, exposed through their dark skin and posed in typologies of traditional dress. 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.
Permanent Gallery Location
Vatichino
Bibliography
Richard L. Kagan. The Spanish Craze: America's Fascination with the Hispanic World, 1779-1939 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), pp. 260 - 64Madeleine Haddon. "'Spain Says It All' Isabella Stewart Gardner's 1888 Travel Albums of Spain" in Diana Seave Greenwald and Casey Riley (ed.). Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner's Travel Albums. Exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2023), pp. 54-69, fig. 6. Diana Seave Greenwald and Casey Riley (ed.). Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner's Travel Albums. Exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2023), pp. 78-91, 210, plates13-19, no. 17.
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