Mrs. Jack Gardner

In her Venetian palace, surrounded by rare, beautiful and very precious treasures of Art -a collection estimated second only to that of John Pierpont Morgan -Mrs. Jack Gardner of Boston died at the age of 85. Fenway Court is one of the most glorious monuments to American wealth. Its marble Renaissance doorway opens to the public a few days each year. Virtually all of the stones in the structure were brought from Venice. Around the central court are balconies brought from the Ca' d'Oro, the most beautiful Gothic palace on the Grand Canal. The pavement is an ancient Roman one. Arab, Greek, Roman, Gothic and Renaissance sculpture fills the niches, flanks, the broad.stair. Off the adjoining corridor is a chapel from a monastery. The rooms are crowded with many world-famed paintings, decorated with furnishings that are authentic works of Art in their own right. There are Italian cassone, papal chairs, a cheminee of Francis the First. Spanish embossed leather covers the walls of one room. Among the artists represented are Raphael, Veronese, Titian, Botticelli,, Fra Angelico, Giotto, Pollaiuolo, da Fabriano, Diirer, Holbein, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Ribera, Velasquez, Sargent, Zorn, La Farge, Whistler. Three of the most famous paintings are da Fabriano's Madonna and Child, Titian's magnificent Rape of Europa, and the glorious Velasquez portrait Pope Innocent X. It is hoped that the collection will still be available to students and lovers of Art as it always has been under its late mistress.

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Quite as much as for her Art treasures was "Mrs. Jack" famed for her eccentricities. In the conventional chill of Boston weather, her exotic personality bloomed.

Under an imported ceiling depicting the more unprintable scenes from Ovid, she held "salons" in Old World style-and thither flocked celebrities American and European. She hired a lion from Bostock Circus, took it home for a pet. She mastered jiu jitsu, and many a corpulent matron strove to do likewise to keep up. She admired Sandow, famed strong man, and sat unconcernedly in ' box to see Jim Corbett, at a time when such behavior was, for a lady, unheard of. She hired Paderewski on one occasion, distributing tickets to all who wished to hear him. She sponsored a newsboys' baseball team. At 73 she engaged M. Kosloff to teach her Russian dance steps.

One Spring day in 1889, her magnificently equipped carriage rolled up to the dignified Church of St. John the Evangelist. She alighted, dressed in the modern equivalent of sackcloth and ashes, carrying a pail and scrubbing-brush, 'dropped to her knees, scrubbed the tiling, "did penance for her sins."

She was recognized as the chief figure in at least four novels: Marion Crawford's To Leeward; Hamilton Aide's Voyage of Discovery, and two others, Mrs. Harry St. John and Ralph Saint Claire, by Count Zuboff (who hanged himself in 1896).

Withal, she gave generously to numberless charities, assisting young musicians and artists, encouraging tenement children in love of beauty by offering cash prizes for the best flower displays in their window-boxes, contributing substantially to the first aviation meet held in America (at Squantum, Mass., in 1910).

She was, in toto, a fascinating, daring, exotic personage, never pretty, always "smart," a 16th Century Venetian nail in the hub of just-yesterday.