Posts Tagged ‘Isabella Stewart Gardner’
The Living Presence of the Past – Br. Keith Nelson
Br. Keith Nelson
Preached at the annual memorial mass for Isabella Stewart Gardner.
While I have loved drawing ever since I could hold a pencil, it was not until age eleven that I really discovered art history. One sweltering July in the air-conditioned calm of the public library in Hoover, Alabama, I stumbled upon a reading room with a brass plaque and crossed the threshold . . . like entering the wardrobe into Narnia. As I opened one enormous book after another, what I saw astonished me: whole sermons preached in images rather than words. I was listening to the Bible with my eyes. I had been baptized at the age of ten in a local Southern Baptist church, a tradition with little visual art. Art history introduced me to church history. People that had been dead for centuries past pointed me toward eternity – because of course, they were not dead, but alive and waiting for me to join the conversation.
And the one I came to love most of all was a Dominican friar known to posterity as Fra Angelico, who invited me to see not only the world through his eyes, but heaven; not some ethereal cloud remote from us creatures, but a lush garden full of dancing angels and saints engrossed in interpersonal communion.
Could I take drawing lessons from Fra Angelico in heaven? I wasn’t sure, but here was definitely a heaven worth dying and living for. Read More
Generosity is a Symptom of Courage – Br. James Koester
Occasion: Birthday Celebration of Isabella Stewart Gardner
Place: Chapel at the end of the Long Gallery, Gardner Museum
There are a number of words that we might use to describe Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose birthday we are celebrating today. We might use the word audacious. We could describe her as scandalous or provocative. We might call her stubborn. We could call her eccentric. We could certainly call her rich. I am sure that she was called these, and many others besides. But there is one word which we might not normally associate with her. That word is courageous.
I saw that word downstairs in the gallery where the works of one of the Museum’s artists in residence are exhibited several years ago. The works, a series of miniatures, included an excerpt from a letter written to Mrs. Gardner by her friend Matthew Stewart Prichard[1] an art historian and one time assistant curator of the neighbouring MFA. In the letter to Mrs. Gardner, Prichard he wrote: Be generous, generosity is a symptom of courage. If you fear; you are selfish.
We are all here today, because of Mrs. Gardner’s courage. She had the courage to be generous and by her generosity both the Monastery in Cambridge and the Museum here on the Fenway continue to thrive as important cultural and religious centres in the Boston area. Without her generosity neither Museum nor Monastery would exist. Read More