“An exquisitely detailed and perceptive biography.”  — New York Times Book Review

“A sympathetic, impeccably researched biography.” — Wall Street Journal

“Dykstra’s biography … is an empathetic and sensitive portrait of the Sphinx of Fenway Court.” –The Art Newspaper 

“A thrilling new biography … makes the case for [Isabella Stewart Gardner’s] enduring legacy.” —Town and Country

“…in the dazzling Chasing Beauty, Dykstra found a way into Gardner’s life through diligent research that uncovered traces of the woman in the worlds she inhabited. Evocative and absorbing….” —Washington Independent Book Review

“Marshalling vivid facts, fluent insights, and narrative radiance, Dykstra fully captures Gardner’s dynamism, intrepidity, creativity, and singular achievements.” — Booklist (★Starred Review)

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. Includes archival photos of Isabella’s world, museum, and the art she collected.

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.

Explore the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum

Note from the Author:

I cannot wait for readers to discover all that I’ve discovered in numerous archives in Boston but also in Paris and Venice.  Isabella, art collector and founder of the remarkable Boston museum that bears her name, was forthright but mysterious.  From her iconic string of pearls bought at Boucheron in Paris to her capacity for enduring friendships, from her soaring ambition and work ethic to a lingering vulnerability—she has always surprised me.  Every time I thought I knew her, I found out more.

What drew me to her story is also what is so distinctive about her museum – how one travels from darkness into light and back again, much like one walking through the streets and alleys of Venice, the city that so inspired her.  It is a pattern or rhythm that helped me make sense of her life, how she moved from searing loss to great accomplishment and how her pursuit of beauty became an open-hearted pleasure she wanted to share with others.

Praise & Reviews:

“[Dykstra’s) narrative is precise yet animated, offering illuminating details without becoming mired in facts.” — Times Literary Supplement

“…an extensively researched and engaging biography that reveals the many layers of the defiant pleasure seeker, patron, and traveler.” – Hyperallergic

“Thoroughly researched . . . the author captures the sweep and energy of [Gardner’s] life . . . A richly detailed biographical portrait.” — Kirkus Reviews

“An elegant depiction of a larger-than-life trailblazer.” — Publishers Weekly

“Isabella Stewart Gardner has found the ideal biographer in Natalie Dykstra, who gives Gardner, her nerves of steel, her expert eye, and her singular curiosity their due in this wise, sparkling book.”
—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams and Cleopatra: A Life

“The complex, magnificent life of Isabella Stewart Gardner pours through the pages of Natalie Dykstra’s wonderful, definitive biography. Gardner left an incomparable legacy; at long last, she has found a biographer who can match her in range, profundity, and eye for detail. It is thrilling to watch the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum rise again in this powerful, timely book.”
—Rachel Cohen, author of A Chance Meeting: Encounters Between American Writers and Artists

“Natalie Dykstra has written an absorbing, deeply researched biography that is also a travelogue, Edwardian period drama, and art history primer, with a supporting cast that includes Henry James, John Singer Sargent, Edith Wharton, and Henry Adams. In these pages, Isabella Stewart Gardner comes to life as a feminist pathbreaker finally given her due—and an artist in her own right.”
—Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Dykstra’s deeply researched biography reveals the complex modern woman behind Isabella Stewart Gardner’s trademark gauzy veils. It’s such a compelling tale, how a woman born into a Victorian world of privilege and propriety stepped outside the dos and don’ts of her social set to become an incomparable entrepreneur and cultural visionary.”
—Wanda M. Corn, author of Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern

“A lifelong friend of Henry James, Gardner inspired some of his fictional heroines yet surpassed them all in her psychological complexity, the magnificence of her vision, and her zest for experience. Dykstra tells a captivating story of an artist and her time.”
—Linda Leavell, author of Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore

“Copiously researched and engagingly written, Chasing Beauty is biography at its best: a vivid, empathic portrait of an extraordinary woman.”
—Caroline Weber, author of Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris