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Description :
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Stewart Mausoleum
Green-Wood Cemetery
Brooklyn, New York
Noted architect, Stanford White, designed this mausoleum for the Stewart family. Although records do not indicate how many monuments and mausoleums White personally designed, his firm, McKim, Mead and White, designed 40 funerary monuments between 1879 and 1919. Most of the firm’s designs are classical in origin and the firm often collaborated with other designers and sculptors to achieve the final product.
White’s rather plain design for the Stewart mausoleum is enhanced by bronze reliefs sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Saint-Gaudens achieved fame as the designer of the United States’ twenty dollar gold piece, often known referred to simply as the “Saint-Gaudens”. The bronze panels Saint-Gaudens crafted for the Stewart mausoleum are very low relief and look as if they have been scratched into the surface. One panel depicts an angel holding a banner or scroll, symbolizing the taking of the inventory of one’s life. The other panel presents an angel holding a long horn, symbolizing the Archangel Gabriel, who signals the heavens of the impending arrival of another soul. The angel is seated on a bench which is inscribed with a biblical verse.
The mausoleum, built on property acquired in 1881, was originally designed to house the remains of two year old John “Jackie” Stewart, who died in 1865 following a bout of pneumonia.
Jackie was the son of Jack Gardner and Isabella Stewart Gardner. Isabella was a wealthy woman in her own right. She had inherited a great deal of money from her father, David Stewart, who made his fortune from Pennsylvania ironworks.
To help relieve her depression over Jackie’s untimely death, Isabella’s doctor suggested a trip to Europe. During her trip, she further relieved her depression, by purchasing Rembrandts, Vermeers, Titians and Botticellis. These beautiful works of art would later become the foundation of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
She opened her “house museum” to the public, but ruled over it like a mother hen. Even in her later years, when she was bedridden, she would call out to imaginary visitors not to touch her treasured works of art. Isabella and young Jackie are buried in Boston, close to her art collection, rather than in the family tomb in Brooklyn.”
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