Gardner’s Eden

Isabella Steward Gardner Museum, 2025

Director's Foreward, Isabella Steward Gardner Museum

I first met James Prosek when I was the interim Director at the Morgan Library and Museum, having been introduced by Drawings curator John Marciari. It was immediately apparent that I’d encountered an artist of great talent and even greater curiosity. From childhood, James has been an observer and explorer of the natural world—a direction that expanded with experience and travel to impart a global perspective— ultimately becoming an award-winning artist, writer, and naturalist. Prosek’s art reflects the world around him and expresses profound concern for the disappearance of natural habitats, one result of ecosystem mismanagement by humans. Going beyond how we name, systematize, and order nature, he is drawn to that which does not fit neatly into our categories, positing new combinations or envisioning the wondrous exceptions to evolution. Hybridity in all its forms first attracted him to the Gardner Museum and gradually evolved into a fascination with Isabella’s Courtyard garden as a metaphor for Paradise.

The genesis of Gardner’s Eden dates to Prosek’s first artist’s residency at the Museum in 2018. He approached our Museum as he does the streams of New England or the habitats of distant lands: through drawing. Instead of sketching birds, eels, or moths, Prosek focused on paintings, plants, and even the rocks that Isabella Stewart Gardner collected and preserved in her desk in the Macknight Room. Between visits to the Courtyard, the galleries, and Museum archives, he returned here again and again, eventually creating the 54 beautiful drawings published in this book. From views of iconic Museum spaces to little known flora preserved in our Archive—such as ivy from the grave of Richard Wagner or a leaf from the rock where Goethe and Von Stein sat—his choices encompass the breadth and depth of Isabella’s tastes and reveal Prosek’s thoughtful eye. His fascination with the Museum’s collection extends from its objects to the letters, diaries, and travel albums that provide glimpses of Gardner’s personality, the things that moved her, and the events that gave shape to her life. This book pairs his drawings with her words and those of her friends and contemporaries, offering the artist’s very personal view of this Museum and its founder.

I am especially grateful to James Prosek for his marvelous work and Pieranna Cavalchini, the Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art, for bringing this splendid book to completion. For their generous support, I would like to acknowledge Tom and Lisa Blumenthal and the Barbara Lee Program Fund.

Peggy Fogelman
Norma Jean Calderwood Director