| STOP 5 |
Sarah Sears and Belle Gardner:
Women Art Collectors & Patrons
1 Commonwealth Avenue (Harbridge House) at Arlington and Commonwealth to 150–152 Beacon Street (between Berkeley and Clarendon)
Boston
women were also collectors. One Commonwealth Avenue (5a) was once the home
of Sarah Choate Sears (1858–1935), a talented pictorialist photographer
and painter. Sears both bought art and championed artists. Her collection,
now dispersed, was once among the most progressive in Boston. Wealthy art patron Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) lived at 150–152 Beacon Street (5b) before her neo-Venetian palace, Fenway Court (today’s Gardner Museum), opened in 1903. Like Sarah Sears, Gardner nurtured the talents of painters, musicians, and writers, and purchased their work for her museum-home. Her collection of old master paintings is world-renowned to this day.
| STOP 6 |
Art Galleries and Schools:
Marketable Skills
Along Boylston Street toward Copley Square
Galleries where women artists exhibited and sold their work were once found on these blocks. Lilian Westcott Hale (1880–1963) made her artistic debut in 1908 with a display of magical charcoal drawings at Rowlands Galleries at 402 Boylston. The Copley Gallery, where Laura Hills showed her exquisite miniatures, was at 431 Boylston. Doll and Richards, where Polly Thayer (born 1904) exhibited dynamic portraits, was once at 138 Newbury.
At
501 Boylston stood the Rogers Building (1863), the first structure on the
original campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It looked
like the building that now houses the Louis of Boston clothing store (which
once housed the Boston Museum of Natural History, today’s Museum of Science).
In 1865–66, M.I.T. opened the first school of architecture in the United
States. Because of its land grant status, it was required to admit women.
Christel Orvis of Jamaica Plain attended the school as early as 1866–69.
Sophia Hayden was the first woman to graduate from its four-year architectural
program in 1890.