Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner

by Natalie Dykstra

Anyone who has visited Boston and is at all interested in art and museums will be aware of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, with its Venetian palace inner courtyard and extraordinary art collection, including works by Titian, Mantegna, Rembrandt, Vermeer (some, sadly, stolen in an art heist in 1990), Matisse, Whistler and Sargent. Fewer will have reflected on the life of the woman who created it. Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra is not the first biography of Mrs. Jack (as she was mainly known in her lifetime) but it’s one that tries to give a sense of her inner life and how that played out vis-à-vis her art collecting. It’s an excellent book because you learn a lot: about art and how it was collected, but also what life was like in the 19th and early 20th centuries for a very wealthy American woman/family. The book will also have you in tears at times, at the sheer scale of tragedy people had to live with before the advent of vaccines and antibiotics.