Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner

by Natalie Dykstra

Overview

The vivid and masterful story of Isabella Stewart Gardner—creator of one of America’s most stunning museums—an American original whose own life was remade by art. Includes archival photos of Isabella’s world, museum, and the art she collected.

Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum, with its plain exterior enfolding an astonishing four-story Italian palazzo, rose from Boston’s Fens at the turn of the twentieth century. Its treasures encompassed not only masterwork paintings but tapestries, rare books, prints, porcelains, and fine furniture.

An extraordinary achievement of storytelling and scholarship, Chasing Beauty illuminates the fascinating ways the museum and its holdings can be seen as a kind of memoir, dazzling and haunting, created with objects instead of words and displayed per Isabella’s wishes in the exact placements she initially curated.

Born in 1840 to a privileged New York family, Isabella Stewart married Boston Brahmin Jack Gardner as she turned twenty. She was misunderstood by Boston’s insular society and suffered the death of her only child, a beloved boy, not yet two years old.

But in time came friendships, glittering and bohemian; awe-inspiring world travels; and collecting beautiful things with a keen eye and competitive pace—all these were 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, Chasing Beauty is the story of the complex and singular woman behind one of the most fascinating museums in the nation and the world—a tale of beauty and loss, grit and American self-invention.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063378353
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/11/2025
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	103,962
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 5.90(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life. Her work on Isabella Stewart Gardner has won a Public Scholars Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities and an inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship sponsored by the Biographers International Organization (BIO). Dykstra, emerita professor of English at Hope College in Michigan, lives with her husband in Waltham, MA.  

Editorial Reviews

02/19/2024

Biographer Dykstra (Clover Adams) paints a captivating portrait of philanthropist and museum founder Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924). Raised near New York City’s Washington Square, Belle (as she was known) developed an “early appreciation for art.” At age 20, she married Boston Brahmin Jack Gardner, who worked at her family’s shipping and real estate firm. Her charmed life collapsed five years later, when her toddler son died in 1865. Afflicted with “neurasthenia,” she was taken by Jack on the first of many trips abroad to recover, and the couple returned to Boston in 1867 laden with art and treasures. She became a fashion icon (known for her “signature” pearl necklace) and a patroness of the English label House of Worth. By 1880, she aimed to establish an art salon in Boston inspired by the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice. After Jack died in 1898, she devoted herself to building Fenway Court—today known as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—to display her impressive collection. Dykstra’s high-spirited narrative devotes ample time to Gardner’s friendships with famous figures, including Henry James (whose Portrait of a Lady she inspired) and John Singer Sargent (her museum’s inaugural artist in residence). It’s an elegant depiction of a larger-than-life trailblazer. Illus. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, Zoë Pagnamenta Agency. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Isabella Stewart Gardner has found the ideal biographer in Natalie Dykstra, who gives Gardner, her nerves of steel, her expert eye, and her singular curiosity their due in this wise, sparkling book.” — Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams and Cleopatra: A Life

“Natalie Dykstra has written an absorbing, deeply researched biography that is also a travelogue, Edwardian period drama, and art history primer, with a supporting cast that includes Henry James, John Singer Sargent, Edith Wharton, and Henry Adams. In these pages, Isabella Stewart Gardner comes to life as a feminist pathbreaker finally given her due—and an artist in her own right.” — Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“The complex, magnificent life of Isabella Stewart Gardner pours through the pages of Natalie Dykstra’s wonderful, definitive biography. Gardner left an incomparable legacy; at long last, she has found a biographer who can match her in range, profundity, and eye for detail. It is thrilling to watch the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum rise again in this powerful, timely book.” — Rachel Cohen, author of A Chance Meeting: American Encounters

“Dykstra’s deeply researched biography reveals the complex modern woman behind Isabella Stewart Gardner’s trademark gauzy veils. It’s such a compelling tale, how a woman born into a Victorian world of privilege and propriety stepped outside the dos and don’ts of her social set to become an incomparable entrepreneur and cultural visionary.”  — Wanda M. Corn, author of Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern

“A lifelong friend of Henry James, Gardner inspired some of his fictional heroines yet surpassed them all in her psychological complexity, the magnificence of her vision, and her zest for experience. Dykstra tells a captivating story of an artist and her time.”  — Linda Leavell, author of Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore  

“Copiously researched and engagingly written, Chasing Beauty is biography at its best: a vivid, empathic portrait of an extraordinary woman.” — Caroline Weber, author of Proust's Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris

“Thoroughly researched . . . the author captures the sweep and energy of [Gardner’s] life . . . A richly detailed biographical portrait.” — Kirkus Reviews

“An elegant depiction of a larger-than-life trailblazer.” — Publishers Weekly

“An exquisitely detailed and perceptive biography.”  — New York Times Book Review

"A sympathetic, impeccably researched biography." — Wall Street Journal

“Marshalling vivid facts, fluent insights, and narrative radiance, Dykstra fully captures Gardner's dynamism, intrepidity, creativity, and singular achievements”
— Booklist (starred review)

“[A] thrilling new biography.”  — Town & Country

From the Publisher

The privileged world of the spirited Isabella Stewart Gardner is aptly captured by the patrician voice of narrator Maggie-Meg Reed. Born in 1840 to a wealthy family in New York City, Isabella married Boston Brahmin Jack Gardner and proceeded to both dazzle and confuse proper Boston elites. Reed softens her tone when "Mrs. Jack" suffers the death of her only child, to recover, sets off on a lifetime of world travels, collecting art for her several grand homes. Reed's careful pacing and expression elicit genuine admiration for the eccentric and sometimes scandalous Isabella. Gardner leaves as her legacy the Fenway Court building, now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, famous for its interior Venetian palazzo, eclectic collections, and of course, the still unsolved art heist. J.E.S. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2024 - AudioFile

2024-01-18
The life of a preeminent art collector.

Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924), designer and founder of a Boston museum filled with her collections, was born into money and married into more. When she wed Jack Gardner in 1859, she joined one of the wealthiest, most powerful families in America. As Dykstra, author of Clover Adams, portrays her in a thoroughly researched, sympathetic biography, Gardner resisted the role of socialite to become a discerning patron of the arts. She was “a woman who saw what was expected of her as a Boston matron and decided to be something else. She made sense of her long life through far-reaching travel, avid collecting, and an all-consuming pursuit of beauty.” Dykstra reports those extensive trips in detail, making much of the biography read like a travelogue of places and famous people, including Henry James, John Singer Sargent, James Whistler, and Henry Adams. Along the way, Gardener shopped—for clothing, silks, pearls, and art. She could afford whatever appealed to her: Vermeer, Botticelli, Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Titian, among many more. Bernard Berenson, at the start of his career as a prominent connoisseur and art dealer, counted Gardner as his most important client. Her comings and goings, “musical occasions” and parties, were noted in the press. “Mrs. Jack Gardner is one of the seven wonders of Boston,” a reporter exulted in 1875. “There is nobody like her in any city in this country. She is a millionaire Bohemienne. She is eccentric, and she has the courage of eccentricity.” Dykstra deals with Gardner’s reticence—her diaries do not reveal her innermost feelings—with intelligent conjectures. “It is said that no more self-contained woman ever lived,” the Boston Journal noted in a profile. Ultimately, the author captures the sweep and energy of her life, and the book includes photographs and artwork.

A richly detailed biographical portrait.

Kirkus Reviews