“Step away from the rope, ma’am!”
There‘s not even a hint of mercy in his tone. I mutter my apologies and move on. I’m in Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and it’s very, very cool. The eponymous Gardner (Behold: her progressive and provocative portrait! Forearms! Cleavage!) was a visionary art collector who constructed the most gorgeous - and pretty surreal - Venetian-esque museum to display works by Rembrandt, Vermeer and Raphael. Just, y'know, for her pleasure.
Gardner died in 1924, leaving the museum “for the education and enjoyment of the public forever.” She provided an endowment to operate the museum, stipulating in her will that nothing in the galleries should be changed, and no items be acquired or sold from the collection. And therein lies the real draw of the museum and the reason for aforementioned security guard’s tetchiness...
In 1990, the Isabella Stewart Gardner was the victim of the largest art heist in history. (You absolutely must read about it and I highly recommend the following podcast: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/648710646/last-seen) I’ve become slightly obsessed with the still-unsolved theft and was fascinated by the empty surrounds that have remained on the walls ever since, as per Gardner’s will. There was something really ominous and a bit surreal about the frames!
My friend Lauren came to visit me in Boston on my final day in the States. As well as cultivating art-crime fixations, we had brunch in a historical diner that served the greatest honeyed, brown sugar bacon! (I’m salivating as I type.) Lauren then showed me some of the essential sights of Boston such as Quincy Market, Little Italy and the Freedom Trail. The city centre is so wee and walkable!
As one of the oldest cities in the United States, Boston is a delight to visit but I have to admit I am more taken by the offerings of the further-flung small towns of Massachusetts.
The day before, I had taken a drive out to Concord to visit LOUISA MAY ALCOTT’S HOUSE. I can’t even attempt to play it cool, especially as I reread Little Women last month, before seeing Greta Gerwig’s incredible cinematic adaptation. (Oscars for Florence Pugh and Queen Meryl please, universe.)
I was lucky enough to end up taking a private tour of the home and, Christopher Columbus, it was really, really special. The home is not even slightly like a museum; it has been kept in the family and is beautifully and authentically preserved. No glass, no ropes, no barriers. Just everything, in its place, as it was. There is no photography allowed inside the home and I was desperately trying to memorise everything I heard and saw! Here are some of the many, many, many, many highlights:
• Louisa’s desk (built by her father into the wall between her two bedroom windows) where she wrote Little Women.
• Next to the Little Women desk is a beautiful, ‘fancy’ desk Louisa bought when she became successful. Nothing she wrote at the fancy desk was every commercially successful!
• A giant, regal painting of Louisa’s grandmother adorns the master bedroom wall. In it, she is proudly clutching a hardback book in 'university diploma' style. As women were largely illiterate in her time, she was very proud to be a voracious reader and writer.
• Louisa’s mother, Abba, was an activist for the women’s suffrage movement. She did not live to see women get the vote but, to honour her mother, Louisa was the first woman in Concord though the door to cast her vote on March 29th, 1880.
• The Alcotts served as station masters on the Underground Railroad and often helped hide runaway slaves in their basement.
• Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson were friends of the Alcotts and frequent visitors to the house.
• Father of the family, Bronson Alcott, was an English teacher who was sacked 25 times for his radical and outrageous ideas. For example, he allowed children recess, field trips and didn’t believe in a one-size-fits-all curriculum... Madness. He was finally disgraced and banned from teaching when he attempted to enrol a black student in his class.
• May Alcott (Amy March) was an incredible artist and was allowed creative freedom in the family home. Her pencil sketches and paintings survive all over the walls, around the fireplace, on a wooden chopping board... She also painted an owl on the fireplace surround of Louisa’s bedroom, on account of the family referring to Louisa as being a wise old owl!
• Elizabeth Alcott‘s (Beth's) piano sits at the bottom of the staircase as a tribute to her.
There was an old trunk full of the original costumes that the Alcott girls made and wore when performing their plays.
• When May Alcott became a renowned artist, a local family asked for her help. Their son was studying at Massachusetts Institute of Technology but was falling behind with his studies due to his love of hanging out at the college cafeteria, carving figures from vegetables! His parents asked May to meet with him and perhaps offer some lessons, to encourage his artistic leanings as a hobby rather than a career. She did the opposite. May encouraged the young man to follow his dreams and even gifted him her old sculpting tools. He dropped out of MIT and became one of America’s most prolific sculptors... As a public thanks for her encouragement, Daniel Chester French ceremoniously used May Alcott’s tools when he sculpted the Lincoln Memorial! (This blew my mind!)
I can't believe how much I loved the home and the stories that were born from it. What a family!
As my time in the States came to an end I was so grateful to the many people I had met along the way. I have to say, however, that there is a special place in my stoney heart for the bloody brilliant women who featured so prominently in my American Dream. Emily Dickinson, Sally, Peg, Kerrin, Dawn, Lauren, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Abba Alcott, May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, Sonya, Marjolaine, Carolyn, Annie and Karen: there is a world of fierceness, decency, brilliance, humour, kindness and inspiration there. Important women. Great women. But not little women. No, never little women.
”So she enjoyed herself heartily, and found, what isn’t always the case, that her granted wish was all she had hoped.” (Louisa May Alcott, Little Women)
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