We spent the morning in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, always a heady experience, now entered through the back by way of the lightweight extension recently added by Renzo Piano:-
It hasn’t changed the intensity of the combination of major works of art in a setting which is neither domestic, nor a museum – a combination of storehouse, garden, church and Venetian palazzo. I don’t know anywhere better to experience the dream of Bostonian Europeanism – the purchase of works of art, advised by Bernard Berenson, from European collections, and the extreme appreciation of European culture in the circle of Sargent and Henry James:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
It is a remarkable Collection : like Kenneth Clark she was influenced by Berenson but her interests and passions went much further than his and included the Islamic World and the Far East.
But Berenson, too, was interested in Asian art, wasn’t he ? There used to be a photograph of Berenson as a beautiful young man right by the front door, which is no longer there. I used to think that it helped to explain the nature of the collection. I see that their letters have now been published. Charles