Chasing Beauty
The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Descripció de l’editorial
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.
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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.