Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra

Isabella Stewart Gardner’s singular art museum, with its plain exterior enfolding an astonishing four-story Italian palazzo, rose from Boston’s Fens at the turn of the twentieth century. Chasing Beauty is a biography of the extraordinary Gilded Age socialite who founded the Gardner museum. Eccentric, intelligent, and original, she was misunderstood by Boston’s insular society and suffered the death of her only child. But in time came friendships, glittering and bohemian; world travels to Egypt and Syria; and collecting beautiful things. Henry James and John Singer Sargent—whose 1888 portrait of Gardner was a scandalous masterpiece—prized her friendship. Chasing Beauty is a “wise, sparkling” prose portrait by Gardner’s “ideal biographer”, says bestselling writer Stacy Schiff.