Birmingham Book Club

Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner

Good conversation, friendly faces and great books - that's what book club is all about. We're looking forward to seeing you at our lively and engaging book discussion.

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

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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.