BOSTON — Author Henry James is invited, along with his brother William, the noted philosopher and psychologist. Painter John Singer Sargent is on the guest list, as are opera singer Nellie Melba and social activist Julia Ward Howe, who wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
Add the gilded china, stemware of Venetian glass, and gleaming silverware and you have the imaginary holiday dinner party being thrown by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
Mrs. Gardner's Holiday Table is open for viewing (but unfortunately not for dining) in the museum's Dutch Room through Jan. 9. Set with Gardner's own dinnerware, it's a painstaking re-creation of one of her December dinner parties, circa 1904. All that's missing are the guests themselves.
Gardner, born in 1840, became one of the foremost female patrons of the arts and established the first art museum in the United States created solely from a personal collection.
Sargent, the Jameses and other luminaries of the day were indeed frequent dinner guests at the replica Renaissance palace in the city's Fenway neighborhood, built to serve as both a home and museum.
But the curators did take some creative license — none of the guests whose names appear on the place cards ever attended one of Gardner's dinner parties at the same time.
Places are also set for Gardner's niece Olga Monks and Okakura Kakuzo, then curator of Asian art at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.
Kristin Parker, the Gardner museum's collections manager, hopes the exhibit will take visitors back to an era when strict rules of etiquette governed dinner parties. For instance, it was taboo to sit next to a spouse or relative.
"While we sit in front of the television with TV trays in our laps it's just a reminder of how we can participate in conversation," Parker said.
Using a knife to cut bread was frowned upon, too; you were supposed to tear it with your hands. "It could be a fairly stressful time if you didn't know the rules," she said.
The table itself, which Gardner purchased in Florence, Italy, dates to 1590 and was once in the dining hall of a monastery.
Gardner chose her dinner party menus from "Mrs. Beeton's Every-Day Cookery and Housekeeping Book." A typical menu would include oyster soup, melon, flounder, mutton cutlets, rock quail with watercress, fried celery and potatoes.
"I think it's quite lovely. I think it's elegant and happy," said Burt Cohen, 60, of Sacramento, Calif., who was visiting the museum with his wife.
"It's the kind of table where you could sit around and have good food and good conversation and good wine and enjoy the crystal and china and other people," he said. "I think it has the making of a good evening."