How to win and lose

“Mrs. (Isabella Stewart) Gardner in White’’ (1922), by John Singer Sargent. 

“Win as though you were used to it, and lose as if you like it.’’

— Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924), American art collector, philanthropist, and patroness of the arts. She founded the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston, which has a spectacular collection, though slightly less so after the world’s greatest art theft, in 1990. Its perpetrators have not been caught.

The art of correspondence

From "Ever Yours, Henry James,'' a site-specific installation  by conceptual artist Elane Reichek based on novelist Henry James's letters to Isabella Stewart Gardner, the founder  of the Boston museum (which opened in 1903) where this show will run through December.

The show is a graphic sampler composed of fragments from Henry James's letters to Isabella Stewart Gardner. Ms. Reichek was especially drawn to how Mr. James closed his letters to Mrs. Gardner, from the more formal "with many good wishes" to the very affectionate "always constantly."

By focusing on these closings, Ms. Reichek hopes to illustrate the depth of Mrs. Gardner's and Mr. James's long friendship. Ms. Reichek says: "By making use of the older 19th Century private epistolary mode for a public contemporary art piece, I wanted to cross the literal passage between the old and the new....’’