To paraphrase the great Leo Tolstoy, all middle-class families are alike; every rich family is rich in its own way.
Consider the way slammer-bound Martha Stewart has been rich. Her myriad idiosyncrasies have included moving into my hometown of Bedford, N.Y., buying a 100-plus-acre estate, leveling everything in sight down to the bare ground with bulldozers, erecting an elaborate complex of faux French chateaux with steel beam construction and surrounding it all with a very uncolonial designer stone wall backed by a tastefully hued security fence topped, I think, with barbed wire.
Curiously, this reportedly is where she wants to stay for the five months confinement at home that is part of her sentence as a convicted stock market tippee.
But there’s more to being rich — and idiosyncratic — than bulldozers and barbed wire. Often, the rich turn to art, in the process, creating some of our more interesting and idiosyncratic art museums.
A fun house
Few are quite so interesting and idiosyncratic as the museum created here by Isabella Stewart (no relation) Gardner (1840-1924).
You might call it a fun house for people with fine arts degrees.
Gardner was a mere New York heiress who married a wealthy man from socially loftier Boston, through which she proceeded to cut a swath of devil-may-care independence.
According to one authority of my long acquaintance, this included wearing a Red Sox banner to the symphony, drinking beer at the symphony, driving a locomotive to a picnic at 80 m.p.h., attending boxing matches, insulting Chicago’s Bertha Palmer because she had dinnerware for only 400, wearing actual sack cloth and ashes while scrubbing the steps of the stratospherically High Episcopalian Church of the Advent during Lent.
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But she was a pal of two of her era’s most notable aesthetes: the painter John Singer Sargent and the author Henry James. And when she turned to art collecting, it often was with the guidance of immortal art hustler Bernard Berenson.
When she opened her own art museum in 1903 out near the parkland called The Fens, it was as a shrine to idiosyncrasy.
Upon entering, one is almost immediately and happily confronted by Sargent’s great Spanish dance painting “Jaleo.” But proceeding further, one is sent wandering variously over the centuries: the Early Italian Room, the Raphael Room, the Short Gallery, the Little Salon, the Tapestry Room, the Dutch Room, the Veronese Room, etc.
There are no lecturing wall texts.
“She left no texts whatsoever,” said museum curator Alan Chong. “She deliberately wanted not to determine in any verbal way what people should think about their experience in her museum.”
Experience, indeed. Tapestries in your face here, gloriously antique Italian chairs set in your path there, Rembrandt’s 1629 “Self Portrait” appearing unannounced at the side of a doorway.
“By modern standards, the place seems a little random, but as you walk through the museum as you’re intended to do I think there is a bit of a progression,” Chong said. “It’s not chronological, it’s not logical, but the rooms are quite unified. I think there’s a main theme.”
The central feature of the four-story museum is the fountain courtyard. I found it a bit claustrophobic at first, with its high, confining walls and jumble of Roman statuary. But as I ascended, I realized that it’s intended as an artwork in itself, gaining remarkable degrees of beauty when seen from different elevations and perspectives.
Light show
Some chambers fill with bright sunlight. Others are as dark as monasteries.
“I think part of the shadow and part of the mystery of the place depends on this natural light, of emerging from dark hallways into bright courtyards, from small rooms into big rooms,” Chong said. “It’s not crazy. There was a method to her madness.”
Still, at one point, I couldn’t tell if I was in the Chinese Loggia or the Spanish Cloister — a confusion extending to the museum shop, cafe and men’s room, which seemed all of a piece.
No matter. Finally, in a dim chamber called the Blue Room, I found what I had come to see: art by Gardner’s contemporaries.
A plethora of artwork
There’s a Singer Sargent landscape of a camp in the Rockies (among a plentitude of his works), a Childe Hassam pastel of a New York blizzard, Eduard Manet’s portrait of his mother and Anders Zorn’s wonderful “The Omnibus.” A Zorn portrait of Grover Cleveland’s wife, Frances, abides here as well. His portrait of Gardner in full, daft fling is elsewhere in the building.
“Modernist critics — many of the arts writers from the ’30s through the ’50s — hated this,” Chong said. “They hated the picturesque effects, hated this randomness, hated the confusion and clutter. There’s this element of modern criticism that wants white walls and plain rooms.”
Which explains a lot of things.
The Gardner Museum is best known to many for the extraordinary 1990 robbery in which thieves dressed as cops made off with hundreds of millions of dollars in paintings, including a rare Vermeer (“The Concert”), some Rembrandts and several Degases. They were never recovered.
Never mind. There’s a lot left to see. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is at 280 The Fenway in Boston, 617-566-1401, www.gardnermuseum.org.