ABSTRACT
When in 1891 Guy Waring, a Harvard-educated Bostonian turned western rancher, proposed naming a chain of mountains in north-central Washington State the "Isabella Range", Isabella Stewart Gardner found this cartographical tribute "one of the prettiest compliments she ever received". As Gardner's younger Bostonian friend and confidante Corinna Smith later summarized this paradox, without the exilic life disruptions that spurred Gardner to travel, "there would have been no Fenway Court". The project of Gardner's museum, first conceived in 1896, threatened to physicalize and transgressively embody such a disordering or reordering of aesthetic geographies. In addition to journals, and sometimes as journals, Gardner charted her curative travels in cut-and-paste albums. Gardner's particular mode of "making a reality", that is, articulated her fragments through geographical typology and generalization. Gardner's plans to install her art collection in her Venetian simulacrum repeatedly drew on her personal exile.
