In 1883, Isabella and Jack Gardner began a year exploring Asia, visiting Japan, China and India, and venturing to such exotic locales as the temples of Angkor Wat and the Buddhist monument of Borobudur.
Along the way, the Gardners recorded their reactions to these marvels in diaries and letters home. And Isabella meticulously assembled photographs and souvenirs into albums chronicling their Asian odyssey.
On view through May 31, the exhibition, “Journeys East: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Asia,” explores the complex interaction of travel, collecting and museum formation. The exhibition also attempts to understand Isabella Gardner’s Chinese Room, a personal space filled with Chinese Buddhist sculptures and temple fittings.
On display for the first time together will be all six of her travel albums from her journeys throughout Asia, alongside Asian objects from Japanese screens to India jewelry to a monumental bronze Buddha.
An avid and adventurous traveler †the first American woman to travel to and to ride an oxcart through the jungles of Cambodia †Isabella Gardner was extremely interested in daily life and in the culture, politics and landscape in the places she visited.
These interests are conveyed in these scrapbooks through store-bought postcards, photographs by local artists, drawings, watercolors and even pressed flowers and leaves that she pasted in their pages alongside handwritten notes about the places she visited.
The archives contain 30 of these scrapbooks, in addition to diaries that Gardner kept with more detailed narratives about her travels.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is at 280 The Fenway. For more information, www.gardnermuseum.org or 617-566-1401.
