What We Are Reading Today: Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Travel Albums

What We Are Reading Today: Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Travel Albums
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Updated 07 April 2023
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What We Are Reading Today: Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Travel Albums

What We Are Reading Today: Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Travel Albums

Edited by Diana Seave Greenwald and Casey Riley

In 1865, art collector and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) lost her only child to pneumonia at less than two years old. In an effort to rouse her from depression, Gardner and her husband, Jack, traveled to northern Europe and Russia. It was the first of many trips abroad that would eventually take her from the Middle East to Asia—trips that she documented in exquisitely crafted collaged travel albums. “Fellow Wanderer” brings together nearly 30 of Gardner’s striking travelogues, spanning some 39 countries and offering invaluable perspective on the global influences on this legendary collector and patron of the arts.

This book features beautiful facsimiles of Gardner’s travel albums—largely unpublished until now—along with essays by leading scholars who place these diaries and sketchbooks within the context of the art and culture of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia in the nineteenth century.