On Loss, Theft, and Beauty
If you're going to read one...
I want this one read. I suppose that’s a definitive thing to write. I’ve been at this since January and have a couple of pieces I quite like, but this one, even though I’m only a handful of words in, feels like it will be…something.
I had just pulled into our very, very long driveway, so I suppose I thought that was a good time to play with my phone. (Don’t judge me.) I opened Instagram, and my eyes scanned the first few lines attached to a reel. I stood the truck on its nose and threw my arms up in the air with a squeal! My heart started to pound…
HAD THEY FOUND The Storm on the Sea of Galilee?
I had stumbled upon a book called Rembrandt in the Wind. As an art lover, the title instantly got my attention, but living where I do, I had no way to lay my hands on it in less than a week, so I succumbed to the audio version out of impatience. It was gardening season, after all. Winters are for reading. Summers are for dirt. I was out in my garden for that chapter, toiling in the soil, listening to this book about masterpieces and their artists, and participating in creating my own masterpiece. Chapter fourteen briefly unpacks the story of Isabella Stewart Gardner, a museum, a painter, a painting, and its most likely destruction and demise. I laid down my spade and stood up, arrested as the words came into my ears, capturing my imagination, piquing my curiosity, and grieving me all simultaneously within the 39 minutes it took the narrator to read that portion.
I think subconsciously I knew about some robbery in the 90s, but hearing that chapter of Rembrandt in the Wind — that was the beginning of my obsession with the story of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Rembrandt, beauty, and loss.
A love of beauty, no matter the risk.
When we love beauty, we risk pain.
No matter from what angle you approach beauty, you risk the pain you could encounter at its potential or imminent loss.
Take motherhood.
I gladly let consume me as the most beautiful thing in my life; head over heels, passionately and with everything I had, KNOWING I would feel the pain and loss as each child left home someday. Nineteen years flashed by in five seconds, and now one child has left. That empty room, that empty space at the table, is by far the most gutting pain I have ever felt. More than my miscarriage, more than my parents’ divorce… I get to go through that five more times because I chose the beauty of motherhood. A love of beauty, no matter the risk.
Isabella Gardner chose that beauty.
Isabella Stewart Gardner married Boston Brahmin John “Jack” Gardner in 1863. She had been raised in New York, attended finishing schools in Paris, and came into her marriage with an old-money culture and an independent streak, extravagant clothes, and a love of books; her unorthodox ways shook up the “Boston Brahmin” scene.
Mrs. Jack Gardner is one of the seven wonders of Boston. There is nobody like her in any city in this country. She is a millionaire Bohemienne. She is the leader of the smart set, but she often leads where none dare follow… She imitates nobody; everything she does is novel and original.
— a Boston reporter
She opened herself up to the beauty of motherhood a few years later with the birth of her son, Jackie. Just writing those words brings me a flood of oxytocin and an imagined pins and needles in my breasts as I think of the supreme joy each of my children brings me. I can feel each little newborn lump in my arms as I type. How she must have loved her little Jackie. Did she fathom the risk, or was she too busy loving with her whole heart? I suspect the latter. And while I grieve the natural progression of life and something I am at the same time so proud of, a child capable of leaving home, Isabella encountered what we call a most unnatural progression — the loss of a child. No matter the love of her beautiful little boy, the risk came two years later when her heart in her hands died of pneumonia.
The loss was a devastation.
When my son moved out, I took to the bed.
Literally.
As unprepared as I was for the all-consuming passion I felt when I became his mother, I was equally unprepared for the anguish of his leaving. The waves of grief came like a tsunami, and the subsequent depression like a blackout, Vesuvian-like ash smothering every other part of my life; the air impossible to breathe. I was not ready for it, and truth be told, I’m not over it eight months later. That ash drifts in a cloud above my head, ready to settle again when my defenses are down. I miss him. His big loud voice, his big ‘ole boots at the door, the sound of him bounding up the stairs in the middle of the night for a volunteer fire call. I miss our early quiet mornings in the kitchen when we’d each wake up hours before anyone else, and every glance at our driveway expects to see his truck barreling down it.
“I bind unto my son today, the strong name of the Trinity…”
Sometimes, I go to his room and intentionally have a good cry, but since I still feel the utterly shocking loss of him not sitting there, and I know that ash cloud looms, I try to avoid his room like the plague.
If my nineteen years with him in our home feel like a vapor, I can only imagine the brevity that Isabella felt with her little Jackie, completely robbed. My mind conjures up a 19th-century old-money nursery, a rocking horse in the corner, and an empty crib. Sunlight with floating dust is trying to creep in between the drapes that have been ripped closed in anguish. I imagine the wailing of a wife as caring maids and her husband try to pull her out of her torment.
My imagination can’t be that far from the truth. Grief consumed Isabella to the point where her doctors feared for her health. Her prescription? A Grand Tour: a journey to Europe and the Middle East from 1867-1868, not just to distract her but to help her find solace in art, architecture, and culture.
Solace in beauty.
In her heart of hearts, perhaps Isabella knew that she was wired for beauty. She experienced the beauty of motherhood and then felt its cavernous loss. Perhaps she knew her soul was designed for something more. Something Edenic, something eternal. In response to this, she began to collect art, and lots of it — surrounding herself with order, elegance, and meaning when all meaning had evaporated before her eyes in the lowering of a child-sized coffin into the ground.
Life handed her chaos. And so she created a masterpiece.
That Grand Tour planted seeds in the fertile soil of her heart, which had been worked over by grief. She absorbed the surroundings, she learned, and she journaled.
Her letters to art advisor and close friend Bernard Berenson are among some of the most revealing, sharing her emotional state and passionate grief, her impressions of the museums and churches she visited, and her sense of beauty as something sacred.
I suppose the sensation of beauty is a spiritual one, the mind catching glimpses of the divine through form.
— Isabella Gardner
What started as a path toward healing turned into a grand contribution to society.
As years passed, her collections grew. There’s a refinement that comes with identifying one’s taste. I’m sure, as a Francophile, you’ve felt it yourself in your own small way. As you’ve exposed yourself to this art of French-inspired living and to French culture, you’ve no doubt grown in your selections of art, food, clothing, décor… Isabella’s taste grew too, and a sizeable inheritance from her father’s passing provided even more funds for her to acquire… if not seize beauty for herself.
And then loss came again.
In 1898, Jack suddenly died, and Isabella, now alone, was faced with a world full of pain, longing, and a determination to continue the pursuit of beauty that she and Jack had begun so long ago. Six weeks later, in her grief, her mind turned from not only collecting art, but creating something herself.
Her vision was a Venetian Palazzo in the heart of Boston’s Fenway neighborhood, a museum, but not just a sterile set of halls in which her collections could be displayed; no, this museum would be styled as an Italian home. That vision was subdued on the exterior and stunning on the interior; courtyards filled with ancient Roman columns and mosaics, moody, dim hallways glowing with tapestries, rare books, and altarpieces — every corner composed like a painting. Construction began promptly in 1899, and Isabella oversaw every detail. This was no hand-off heiress with a “dream”. This was a passionate woman, fueled by grief and a desire for beauty, to see her vision become a reality. Here, she housed her collection of Degas, Manet, Titian, Botticelli, and… Rembrandt. Here, she wanted guests to experience art, not simply look at it. Here, she felt her collection was complete, and here, she left explicit orders in her will that not one piece of art be removed from the collection — ever.
I feel sometimes that I must surround myself with beauty as a form of prayer. It is not luxury — it is necessity.
— Isabella Gardner
If only I could give explicit orders for my children to stay small and never leave home. If only Isabella could have given such orders to preserve the life of her child — and her husband. Instead, she took her pain and sought beauty as a way to heal, and in doing so, she created a place for everyone — joyful or hurting — to come and experience art. And they did, just as she intended, for one hundred years… until March 18, 1990.
From empty crib to empty frames
Around 1:24 a.m., two men came into the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum posing as police officers, claiming they were responding to a disturbance. Breaking protocol, the guard on duty let them in the side entrance, and before he knew it, he and his co-worker were handcuffed to opposing pipes in the basement as the thieves did their horrendous dirty work.
Making their way through the mansion, they hastily stole 13 pieces of art, valued at 500 million dollars. Those pieces included:
Vermeer’s The Concert – one of only 36 known Vermeers in existence
Rembrandt’s A Lady and Gentleman in Black
A small self-portrait etching by Rembrandt
Manet’s Chez Tortoni
Degas sketches and a Chinese bronze finial
A mysterious Napoleonic eagle finial from atop a flagpole — its significance still debated
They were in such a hurry and had such disregard for their conquests that some of the paintings were cut right out of the frames, including Rembrandt’s only known seascape —The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.
The painting features a small boat being hurled up by a wave, moments from capsizing. In the boat are the disciples and a freshly awoken Jesus. It’s a magnificent display of chiaroscuro — Rembrandt’s ability to use light and darkness to portray emotion and intensity.
It’s a favorite of mine, and it has vanished.
From there, the story spirals into organized crime, lies, and the biggest unsolved art heist of our time.
What we steal and what we keep
Beauty stolen.
What beauty do we allow to be stolen from our lives? Lost moments with someone we love? Busyness that steals our peace? Mass-produced beige and twaddle that robs our homes of history, tradition, and soul? Has our faith been robbed of awe by the thief of contemplation and repentance?
Sacred Spaces and Mystery
Today, the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum looks like it did on the day she wrote her will, stating that it should never change; every piece there except those thirteen that were stolen. As an homage to the lost pieces, their frames still hang there — empty.
Our lives are full of empty frames, of things unjustly or untimely taken from us that we may never get back. Empty seats at the table. Empty bedrooms.
How many empty frames, how many voids do we try to fill with something that’s not the real thing? What about NOT filling them? How many empty frames could I look at, trusting in what I don’t see and knowing that it’s still valuable? In what areas of our lives have we chosen to give up instead of pursuing beauty? How have I lost the faith that it takes to look at an empty frame and still see something of value?
That reel on Instagram that filled me with so much hope that The Storm on the Sea of Galilee had been found was a fake; it was a movie clip. For a split second, I thought it was true.
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
— Hebrews 11:1
Unseen art.
The sacred empty frames of our lives and the ache for what once was.
The need to create and seek out beauty.
Rembrandt painted himself into that tempestuous seascape. I choose to paint myself into it, too. Like Isabella, I know my soul was designed for something more. Something Edenic, something eternal. Like Rembrandt knew when he painted himself staring right out of the painting into our eyes, I know my beautiful Savior is awake, with the ability to calm the storm.
So what if the empty frames aren’t a total loss of beauty but a space beauty will return to? What if Aidan’s room will be filled with grandbabies someday? Or maybe he’ll come back home at some point to save money? Or maybe… It’s there to remind me of my commitment to mothering when the hustle of life and daily stress scews my priorities.
What if the empty frames aren’t a wound, but a frame waiting for Glory?
So, I will keep curating a beautiful life. I’ll keep placing things where they belong — even around the empty frames — because I believe in what I do not see. And I know: the Creator of Beauty is not asleep in the boat.
