Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner

Award-winning author Natalie Dykstra will present a lecture on her new biography Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner—the story of the complex and singular woman behind one of the most fascinating museums in the world—a tale of beauty and loss, grit and American self-invention.

Born in 1840 to a privileged New York family, Isabella Stewart married Boston Brahmin Jack Gardner (son of Catherine Peabody Gardner of Salem!) 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.

Friendships came in time, both 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.

An extraordinary achievement of storytelling and scholarship, Chasing Beauty by Natalie Dykstra illuminates the fascinating ways the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum and its holdings can be seen as a kind of memoir, dazzling and haunting, created with objects instead of words.

Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life, which won a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) 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 inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research Fellowship from the Biographers International Organization. She has been a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society since 2011 and is an emerita professor of English at Hope College. She lives with her husband near Boston.

This event is presented through a partnership between the Salem Athenaeum and Hamilton Hall, and is hybrid. Guests may join in person or online. Light refreshments and a book signing with Wicked Good Books will be offered in the Hall after the talk.