When Natalie Dykstra set out to write a biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, she faced a problem that vexes many an author of women’s history: a paucity of records that shed light on a female subject’s inner life. Gardner left a major legacy as founder of an eponymous private art museum in Boston. Her obsessive drive as a collector, with acquisitions totaling 17,000 objects, was exceptional even in the ultrawealthy orbit of Gilded Age America. Dykstra found herself drowning in material on the art and other treasures, but Gardner herself was elusive. Like many women of her era who sought to keep their private lives private, she destroyed most of her letters and other personal papers.

Yet 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, the book benefits from an approach favored by Robert Caro, the acclaimed biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson. “If a place or setting played a crucial role in shaping a character’s feelings, drives, motivations and insecurities,” Caro has said, “then by describing the place well enough, the author will have succeeded in bringing the reader closer to an understanding of the character.” Here, place and setting figure hugely in showing the forces that influenced Gardner’s passion and aesthetic sensibilities.

Born into a wealthy New York family, Belle (as she was called) came of age in cosmopolitan Europe. At finishing school in Paris, her exuberance and sure sense of herself made a strong impression. “Jolly and splendid,” a classmate wrote of her new friend. A later acquaintance observed that Gardner moved “like a ship in full sail.” A keen interest in knowing more about anything that caught her interest was a defining trait.

Early in the book, Dykstra reveals an incident that sets off the larger story. It occurred when Belle was in her teens and traveling with her family. In Milan, they visited a private residence (Poldi Pezzoli) that housed an extraordinary art collection. All three stories of the palazzo were stuffed with luxury objects: paintings by European masters, sculpture, glassworks, textiles, jewelry, and furniture. A friend recalled how the overall effect enchanted Belle, who confided:

“If I ever have money of my own, I am going to build a palace and fill it with beautiful things.”

Marriage at age 20 set her on course to make that dream a reality. Her husband, John Lowell Gardner, was a Boston Brahmin and heir to a shipping fortune. He considered himself the luckiest man in the world to have won the clever young woman who lit up his life. His devotion never wavered, though Isabella’s bohemian tendencies proved too much for the Massachusetts city’s starched upper crust. Their snubbing made her all the more determined to live life on her own terms. As Dykstra writes, she “saw what was expected of her as a Boston matron and decided to do something else.”

The happiness Isabella found with Jack was tempered by tragedy. She adored being a mother, until the couple suffered the loss of their only child, a son who died as a toddler. After a miscarriage that made further childbearing inadvisable, Isabella fell into a state of despair so acute, the family worried for her health. To treat her condition, their doctor urged Jack to take his wife abroad.

So began the frequent trips that gave Isabella a way out of her grief. The Gardners traveled the world for months at a time, immersing themselves in other places and cultures in a quest to satisfy Isabella’s “fevered curiosity” and growing appetite for rare and beautiful things. In an earlier biography, Dykstra analyzed the photographs of the enigmatic Clover Adams for clues to her suicide in 1883. In Chasing Beauty, the author drew heavily on Isabella’s travel scrapbooks and notes to show her evolving ideas about art and her instincts as a collector.

As Isabella honed her knowledge and judgment of art, her discerning eye impressed America’s cultural elite. Boston bluebloods who once ostracized her clamored for an invitation to see the Titian in her red drawing room, to hear private concerts in her salon. A grand cast of characters populates this book. The result is a fascinating — if at times slightly bloated — insider’s look at privileged Victorian society. John Singer Sargent painted Isabella (on one occasion scandalously). Henry James befriended her, while gossiping behind her back. Noted art historian Bernard Berenson helped her acquire many important works.

Isabella was in her 60s and widowed when she channeled her money and energy into building a permanent home for her collection. Dykstra describes how Isabella’s love of Venice inspired her vision of Fenway Court, as the Gardner Museum was called when it opened in 1903. Her ideas for its design were so exacting that she ordered the workmen to hack at the marble columns to make them look more authentic. In galleries surrounding the palazzo-style interior courtyard, Isabella mixed well-known European paintings and sculpture with treasures from different cultures and periods. She also organized objects into tableaux featuring unusual juxtapositions.

To the end of her life, Isabella remained a fierce curator of her own collection. In her will, she stipulated that everything be left as she arranged it.

Her highly calculated composition has led some to view Isabella’s museum as a form of “installation art.” The effect it creates is both beautiful and eclectic. Love it or hate it, there’s no question it flows from the identity of its creator. A great strength of this biography is its humanizing look at a singular woman of remarkable achievement who has often been dismissed as imperious and eccentric. In tracing the roots of Isabella’s artistic expression, Chasing Beauty is also a study of the creative process.   

Diana Parsell is a writer and former journalist in Falls Church, VA. Her book Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington’s Cherry Trees was named a finalist for the Society of Midland Authors’ 2024 Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography & Memoir. She was among the founding writers and editors of the Independent.

comments powered by Disqus