Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner

The vivid and masterful biography 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 narrative nonfiction 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 this Gilded Age art patron found 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 essential art collector biography 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.

This definitive work of women’s history reveals the story behind the legend:

• Boston History: How a privileged New York transplant, misunderstood by Boston’s insular society, carved out a life of daring originality on her own terms.
• A Gilded Age Circle: The glittering, bohemian friendships with Henry James and John Singer Sargent, who captured her originality on canvas in a portrait that became a masterpiece and a scandal.
• Beauty Forged from Loss: The profound personal tragedy that shaped her pursuit of beauty, and how collecting art became a balm for the devastating loss of her only child.
• The Making of a Museum: The creation of the iconic Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as a form of memoir, with every object and its placement telling the dazzling and haunting story of the woman who collected them.

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.