Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner
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AlbakiReads Editorial The woman behind a museum built as a personal world
The woman behind a museum built as a personal world
Natalie Dykstra traces Isabella Stewart Gardner’s path from a privileged New York upbringing and marriage into Boston society to the travels, friendships, and ambitious collecting that shaped her public legacy. The book places Gardner’s personal losses alongside her developing eye for art and the relationships that informed her life, including ties to figures such as Henry James, John Singer Sargent, and Bernard Berenson. Central to the biography is the Gardner museum itself: its paintings, tapestries, rare books, furnishings, and other objects are presented as an enduring, deliberately arranged record of its founder’s vision. Archival photographs add visual context to Gardner, her collection, and the museum.
Good fit for readers who enjoy
- Readers interested in American cultural history at the turn of the twentieth century
- Biography readers drawn to women collectors, patrons, and museum founders
- Art-history readers interested in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and its collection
Themes
Art collectingMuseum makingLoss and reinventionBoston societyWomen’s cultural patronage
Based on publisher information and book metadata.
Book Overview The vivid and masterful story ofIsabella Stewart Gardner--creator of one of America's most stunning museums--an American originalwhose ow...
The vivid and masterful story ofIsabella Stewart Gardner--creator of one of America's most stunning museums--an American originalwhose own life was remade by art. Includes archival photos of Isabella's world, museum, and the artshe collected.
Marfield Prize Winner
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.
Book Details Format: Paperback | Pages: 512 | Language: English | Publisher: MARINER BOOKS | ISBN: 0063378353
FormatPaperback
Pages512
LanguageEnglish
ISBN0063378353
EAN9780063378353
PublisherMARINER BOOKS
Publication Date2025-03-11
AccessoriesNo Accessory
ConditionNew
Product TypeQUALITY PAPERBACK BOOKS
Weight1.15 Pounds
Length8.9 Inches
Width5.9 Inches
Height1.5 Inches
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