Join us for an illustrated talk on Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Author Natalie Dykstra.
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.
Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life, which won a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and was a finalist for the 2013 Massachusetts Book Award. For her recent book, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, she received a NEH Public Scholars grant and the Biographers International Organization (BIO) inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research Fellowship. She has been a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society since 2011 and is a co-organizer of the society’s New England Biography Series. Dykstra, emerita professor of English at Hope College in Michigan, lives with her husband in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Photo credit: Ellen Dykstra
For more information on the Concord Festival of Authors, please visit www.concordfestivalofauthors.org.
