Page 315 - The Secret Museum

I WAS AT A DINNER party in Boston, where I met an 82-year-old man named Hans. I

started chatting to Hans right away and told him I was writing a book about treasures
you’ll never be able to see. With a twinkle in his eye, he said, ‘How wonderful. I
have just the friend for you. He’ll know of some hidden treasures. I’ll introduce you
by letter. He and I travelled together in Mali when we were 19; his name is David
Attenborough.’ Hans is my kind of man.

I think, had he lived a century ago, Hans and Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–
1924) would have been good friends. She was a zestful, curious, travelling sort just
like him and used Boston as a base from which to explore the world, collecting

artefacts and friends, just as he does. Like Isabella, Hans’s home is a cabinet of
curious things; he has a well from Mali in his living room, a photograph of himself
with the Dalai Lama, and shelves full of artefacts from all over Africa. Recently, he
donated three Dogon sculptures to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Isabella Stewart Gardner began adventuring in earnest when her only child died,
aged two. She and her husband set off for Europe to revive her saddened heart. This
was the beginning of a lifetime of travelling, writing, collecting and entertaining.

Her favourite place in the world was Venice. She and her husband, Jack, would
stay at the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal, a gathering spot for American and

English expats. The couple spent their days buying art and antiques, and their
evenings at the opera, or dining with artists and writers.

Back in Boston, she built a replica Venetian palazzo to house her collection, in an
unpopular area surrounded by a marsh. No one could believe she had moved there.
‘What will you do for company?’ they asked. ‘Oh! People will come to me!’ she
replied. Or so I was told at dinner.

She was right. The museum in the reclaimed marsh is now in a popular part of
Boston, down the road from the Museum of Fine Arts and Fenway Park, home of the
Red Sox, and people flock to wander around it and see the treasures she picked up on
her travels.

It is the world’s only private art collection in which the building, collection and

installations are the creation of one individual, and a woman at that. It houses the first
paintings by Botticelli and Piero della Francesca to come to America and her Titian
Europa is considered one of the most important paintings in any American museum.
Nothing has a label beside it: Isabella Stewart Gardner insisted this is how she
wanted her collection to be displayed. Nothing has been moved; even empty frames
remain on the walls after paintings valued at $500 million were stolen. Entry is free
to anyone called Isabella, or who visits on their birthday.

The archives of the museum are stuffed with over 7,000 letters thanking Isabella

for dinners and concerts thrown for her friends, including one from the writer Henry
James and another from the artist John Singer Sargent. ‘Has the music room
dissolved, this morning, in the sunshine? I felt last night as though I were in a Hans