Overview

The vivid and masterful story of an American original--a formidable art collector and builder of one of America's most unique and stunning museums--a late bloomer whose own life was remade by art. Isabella Stewart Gardner's museum, with its plain exterior enfolding an astonishing four-story Italian palazzo, rose from Boston's Fens in 1902. The museum would be a work of art in itself--the first built to house a private collection, which included the first Vermeer and first Botticelli in America. Its treasures encompassed not only paintings but tapestries, rare books, prints, porcelains, fine furniture--all in evocative, intimately personal arrangements. An extraordinary achievement of storytelling and scholarship, Chasing Beauty uncovers the multi-layered self-portrait encoded in the museum's objects and rooms, at the same time delivering the story of a life every bit as dazzling and haunting. Born in 1840 to a privileged New York family, Isabella Stewart married Boston Brahmin Jack Gardner before she was twenty. Misunderstood by Boston's internecine society, Isabella suffered the death of her only child, a beloved two-year-old boy. In time, friendships, glittering and bohemian; awe-inspiring world travels; being in the presence of beautiful things; and soon enough collecting them with a keen eye and competitive pace--all these became balm for loss. Henry James and John Singer Sargent--whose portrait of Isabella was a masterpiece and a scandal--came to recognize her originality. Bernard Berenson, leading connoisseur of the Italian Renaissance, was her art dealer. From award-winning author Natalie Dykstra, the uncovered story of the complex and singular woman behind one of the most fascinating museums in America and the world--a tale of beauty and loss, grit and American self-invention.

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Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life. Her work on Isabella Stewart Gardner has won a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award and an inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Fellowship. Dykstra, emerita professor of English at Hope College, Michigan, has served as a board member of the Biographers International Organization (BIO) since 2020.

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