Book Description: "The narrative is one long, messy, juicy gossip peppered with exclamations. . . . But gossip is an effective rhetoric for this life. . . . Gardner may have hoped, by burning her letters, to escape capture in yet another book plotted like a novel by Henry James. She might have liked this garrulous, sociable portrait of her time." -- Diane Wood Middlebrook, New York Times Book Review (front page review)
"This intimate engrossing biography finally gives the creator of one of the world's great museums credit for her achievements. . . . The author's expertise in American cultural history greatly enriches his narrative." -- The New Yorker
"It's the unauthorized story of the grandest of Boston's grand dames that any sentient person wants to read. The Art of Scandal has a delightful sense of the city that once was the Athens of America." -- Alex Beam, Boston Globe
"He dares to paint in words the woman John Singer Sargent painted on canvas. . . . She is always engagingly human and brimming with life." -- Daniel Aaron, The New Republic
"Gardner's heretofore fugitive life story is riveting because Shand-Tucci turns out to be erudite, witty, and wise. . . . Shand-Tucci describes her adventures, eccentricities, and resounding success as a muse, mentor, patron, and designer, shedding light on a singular woman and her influential role in the evolution of American culture." -- Booklist
Amazon.com: Henry James fictionalized her, John Singer Sargent painted her, Bernard Berenson advised her. But art collector extraordinaire Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) was more than a rich socialite who lucked into friendships with the leading cultural figures of her day. Boston historian Douglass Shand-Tucci convincingly claims her as a pioneering multiculturalist--her famous museum in Fenway Court enshrined Asian art as well as that of the old masters--and a rebel who befriended Jews, homosexuals, and other outcasts from Victorian society. Shand-Tucci's highly colored, romantic prose aptly evokes his fiery, willful, egotistical subject.
Challenging reading, excellent information Unlike most of the reviewers here, I did enjoy Shand Tucci's biography. He has a genuine interest in getting to the "touchy" parts of biography which I find rewarding to have read. The older biographies are very dated hagiographies and really don't prompt an interest in anything but the conventional. This book has interesting things to say about James, Sargent, Bourget, Wharton, Berenson, and others. The style is a little like the gossipy, chatty, whispering voice of a turn of the century Bostonian so it fits well with the idea in the title. This book is certain to lead the future books that come out about Gardner and hopefully people won't continue regarding her as the Byzantine goddess of the Sargent portrait, but a woman of flesh and blood with strengths and weaknesses.
The Real Age of Elegance...and Scandal When one has chance to visit Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a unique cultural institution that should not be missed. One of the nation's most eclectic and idiosyncratic private museums, it represents the personal vision of its namesake, Isabella Steward Gardner, a woman with the means and confidence to assemble an art collection of enormous breadth and exquisite quality. At the same time, her wealth and influence gave her the ability to live life on her terms, despite the steady drumbeat of ugly gossip. Although I have a beautifully detailed volume on Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) and her museum Fenway Court, in my library, it was an "authorized" book, and as such that was left out of the story. However, it is a "warts and all" book that Douglas Shand-Tucci has written despite being in sympathy with his fascinating subject. Gardner married into wealth and she used her husband's cash to collect art - and people. Despite her marriage into the Gardner family, who were influential Boston Brahmins, she carried on scandalous affairs and surrounded herself with gay artists and aesthetes. Many of these relationships were ambiguous at the time for homosexuality had to remain far beneath the surface in the 19th century. John Singer Sargent painted Mrs. Gardner and their relationship was used as the model for Eleanor Palfrey's novel "The Lady and the Painter." The expatraite art historian Bernard Berenson advised her on her purchases, which included Vermeer's gem-like "The Concert" and Titan's great "Rape of Europa." She collected some of Sergeant's major works including the massive "El Jaleo" and he painted a famous portrait of her, as did Whistler and the Swedish artist Anders Zorn. She seemed to collect almost everything including Asian art, which she successfully mixed with the European paintings when she built Fenway Court, her Venician palace close by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, which was constructed at the turn-of-the-century. Shand-Tucci's book is carefully researched and despite the fact that Gardner burned her letters, he seems to have sorted out the tangled web of relationships between the patroness and her friends, lovers and in turn, their relations with each other. This is no small accomplishment, as Garnder knew almost everyone who was anyone in America and Europe. In addition to close relationships with Sargent and Berenson, she knew George Santayana, Richard Wagner, Edith Wharton, Charles Elliot Norton, Henri Matisse, Henry Adams, Henry James and William James. "The Art of Scandal" recreates as era of elegance, taste and affluence, of the long, languid decades before the hell of "The Great War" when the leading families of Europe and America began to intermix, and the treasures of Europe made their ways to our homes and museums.
why oh why? when i set out to write a research paper about Isabella Stewart Gardner, i decided to read her biographies. i opted to read them in chronological order, starting with Morris Carter's published in 1925. i was having a ball learning about such an interesting woman, until i got to the Shand-Tucci biography. this book confused me so much, not only because of it's writing style, but also because of it's content. Mr. Shand-Tucci presents information completely opposite to the info in Morris Carter and Louise Hall Tharp's biographies. these differences were so extreme that i ended up writing my research paper about them. no joke. three thousand words later, and i still feel i could write more on the faults of this book.
Just a side note, i talked to a friend who works at the Gardner Museum, and they stopped selling this biography in the museum shop because its allegations against Mrs. Gardner are so farfetched. if you want to read a good biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, i highly recommend "Mrs. Jack" by Louise Hall Tharp.
The sentences that never end... I am an avid reader and I find the subject of Bella Gardner fascinating, and I was incredibly excited to find yet another book about her amazing life! Yet, little did I know that it would take me almost three weeks to slog through this terribly written piece! With little organization and darting from one thought to another, it is barely held together. But, dear reader, the worst is yet to come. Let me give you an example of just one of the "typical" sentences that make up the writing found within, and remember this is just one sentence: "Perhaps her most vivid counsel ever as muse and mentor, into which central venue of Isabella Gardner's life first James and then Crawford and now Sargent have conducted us, that advice reflects the fact that just as it has been argued of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's friendship with Arthur Hallam that although their relationship lasted a mere four years, those "four years probably [were] the equal in psychic importance to the other seventy-nine of Tennyson's life," so with act one of Gardner's and Crawford's affair, which lasted barely two years." Now I realize how incredibly terrifying this is, and believe me, I have left punctuation, wording and phrasing exactly as they are found in the book. This is but one of three hundred pages of such dismal phrasing. Get the point...
Ugh again Just returned from a trip to Boston...during a dinner party in Cambridge, the following was overheard:
Harvard professor: "...my wife was reading a book about I.S. Gardner, but said it was so bad, she couldn't go on..."
It sounded familiar, and then I recalled this awful book. Sure enough, it was the same.
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