George Peabody Gardner

In December 1898 Jack Gardner, husband of the Boston collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, died without warning. His nephew George Peabody Gardner, a Boston businessman then in his early forties, became a trustee of the estate and looked after Isabella's money in the years when she was building Fenway Court, the palace that is now her museum. For Anders Zorn, Isabella was the most important patron he had in America and a close friend. In the spring of 1899 he was back in the United States painting Boston sitters, and that April he dedicated to her a portrait he had made of Frances Cleveland, wife of the former president. This full-length was George Gardner's own commission, a canvas just over 1.8 metres tall. Zorn shows him as if he has paused in a game of billiards, in a three-piece suit with a cravat and a watch chain across his waistcoat. The picture is signed at the upper right, Zorn 99. It stayed in the family for 60 years and passed to his son, who gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1959.