Sarah Wyman Whitman - Crest of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, about 1900

Designed by Sarah Wyman Whitman (Lowell, Massachusetts, 1842 - 1904, Boston)

Crest of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: C'est Mon Plaisir, about 1900

Sandstone

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.