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.

Amazing woman

All about this magnificent woman impressed me. I will visit her museum. A treasure for sure.

Mrs Jack , America's greatest art collector .

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

A world of art & history & truths…

Such an interesting and wonderfully written book about ISG. I want to go back and revisit the museum since finishing this book. I’ll now have insight into the mind of Isabella! Kudos to the author!

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.

Beautiful Biography of an Extraordinary Woman

It was during a thoughtful and memorable first date with a boy who wanted to impress me that I fell in love visiting the Isabella Stewart Garner Museum for the first time in the late 80s—before the heist. Decades later, I love it still, with its many treasures that invite new discoveries with each visit. I feel so fortunate to have seen the entire well-curated collection, but also saddened when on subsequent visits, that most recently have included my grown children, I stare at the wide wall of empty frames. I concur with the author of Chasing Beauty that Isabella Stewart Gardner would have been furious. And rightly so. She was formidable in all that she accomplished at a time when women had limited agency over big projects, like creating a public museum of her vast collection. Yes, one could argue as other reviewers have, that her voracious acquisitive nature was fed by tremendous wealth, but I would counter that her wealth was an indispensable vehicle for fulfilling a generous vision and legacy that benefits the public to this day. I enjoyed Dykstra’s objectively told biography for her tasteful and respectful treatment of a complex woman of indomitable spirit and determination who I find awe-inspiring. The book was well-researched and organized within the context of its political and cultural times. I listened to the audio version, which was beautifully narrated, and will probably purchase the hardcover so that I can refer to it again. I also look forward to my next time at the museum to be impressed anew and discover many pieces referenced through Dykstra’s scholarly work and to revisit favorites, now having learned more about them. I recommend this book for anyone interested in art, especially its collectors and their collections at a pivotal time in American history. And if you haven’t been yet, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a palace of treasures worth experiencing that reflects its founder’s love of all things beautiful.