Chasing Beauty

The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner

By: Natalie Dykstra

Narrated by: Maggi-Meg Reed

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.

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.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2024 Natalie Dykstra and Zoe Pagnamenta (P)2024 HarperCollins Publishers

Mrs Jack , America's greatest art collector .

dull reading of fascinating story of gilded age excess, social whirl of artists and artworld

A Very Strong Woman

This book is filled with information: names, dates, travel itineraries and gossip. It gets a bit chatty and there is MUCH name-dropping, which does get tiresome, as it is not relevant. What IS interesting is her drive to collect beautiful art and display it as it has never been displayed before. The tragedies she suffered would have destroyed anyone else but she just kept going, and going, and going. I will visit the museum again with a whole new appreciation for it and the art Isabella so generously offered to her public to see. One simply has to be grateful that she was already deceased when her beloved museum was robbed.

The details of the portraits

I enjoyed the entire book the reader did an excellent job describing the paintings and other objects in the museum

Sensory delight for fine art lovers

Sumptuous book outlining the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner that inspired me to enjoy the beauty of the everyday, people, art and experiences.

A chronology

I liked this book very much. It is a long timeline well told. Essentially an exhaustive list of who’s who, where they are, and what they did, principally Mrs Jack, as she was called. It is completely factual, with pages of references and citations in the back. Skillfully recounted by the narrator.

Great story about Isabella Stewart Gardner the art collector and human

As an undergraduate student in the Boston area, I would often visit her museum in the Harvard campus. Top notch and Beautiful collection that she left for various generations. This book is engaging and provides great background on how she built her legacy.

The Penultimate ISG Biography

If you enjoy biography, this book knocks it out of the park. Dykstra brings to us a beautifully written book about the captivating woman, who was, Isabella Stewart Gardner.

It is extremely well researched and accomplishes the difficult task of emoting the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of its subject. It is so much more than facts and figures.

The narrator was fantastic, too…perfectly suited for this book. Highly recommend.

A brilliant life brilliently presented

What an epic life Isabella Stuart Gardner lived! Many lives. Natalie Dykstra paints a masterful portrait of a throughly modern and relatable individual. An ambitious, independent, energetic, accomplished, connected, and successful woman in a time, like ours, when these qualities could make a woman suspect. Yes, she was born into wealth, but what she chose to do with that wealth, how she lived, and who she associated with, was extraordinary in her time and a model for ours. Like Isabella Stuart Gardner’s legacy museum, this ambitious work is brilliantly curated and a flowing effortless pleasure to experience.

History of Bella’s life and the gilded age in captivating detail.

I thoroughly enjoyed “Chasing Beauty.” A good follow-up to the JSSargent biographies I’ve been reading. They were contemporaries as were Henry James, Whistler, Henry Adams, and Bernard Berenson and so many others. Bella was one of a kind who seldom comes around during the centuries. Loved the travelogues and cultural depictions and of course the art descriptions.

Her life

Interesting life she led for sure told in a different way than usual biography very well done