Books by Natalie Dykstra
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.
Interviews where books by Natalie Dykstra were recommended
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1
Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival
by Stephen Greenblatt -
2
The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes
by William Kelleher Storey -
3
Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome
by Jane Draycott -
4
The Traitors Circle: The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany and the Spy Who Betrayed Them
by Jonathan Freedland -
5
Baldwin: A Love Story
by Nicholas Boggs -
6
True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen
by Lance Richardson
New Biographies
New Biographies
Among the new biographies coming out in 2025, the lives of literary figures have been particularly prominent, including new books about Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish adventure writer, and Shakespeare’s rival Christopher Marlowe, who was stabbed to death aged 29. Also popular are reconstructions of lives from the distant past that we know little about, including the first King of England and Fulvia, the first wife of Mark Antony.
