showing you a few, carefully arrayed to help you encounter them one by one, the Gardner presents a saturated environment in which art lives, like a kind of botanical garden of art. Turns out, one realizes, that paintings are happier with wallpaper and furniture and objets than with other paintings on a blank wall. They're happier in natural light, even if that means you can't see much right now. And they really don't mind in the slightest if they have to share a space with objects from other eras or even cultures. Before the invention of the art gallery, no work of art or artist could have imagined or intended work for so antiseptic and single-minded a setting.It helps, of course, that Isabella Stewart Gardner had a knack for juxtaposition. And that she and her buyers assembled a remarkable collection of art, like this 1543 portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger of a Lady Margaret Butts (not that this information was available next to the painting - and what does it really add?). What an incredible portrait, what life experience - what suffering, what patience - Holbein allows us to see in this woman's face, as she looks past us at - what? The gaze seems focused but it may not be something visible she's seeing... Strangely, or perhaps not strangely, that invisible thing feels more real in the Dutch room here, with dark wooden walls, a bumpy brick floor, a heavy carved ceiling, surfaces covered with pottery - and light flooding in through a big open window in the general vicinity of Lady Butt's gaze.
