CONCORD FESTIVAL OF AUTHORS 2024
Natalie Dykstra
Photo Credit: Ellen Dykstra
Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life, which won a National Endowment for the Humanities 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 Biographers International Organization (BIO) inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research Fellowship. She has been a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society since 2011 and is a co-organizer of the society's New England Biography Series. Dykstra, emerita professor of English at Hope College in Michigan, lives with her husband in Waltham, Massachusetts.
An illustrated talk on Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner
by Author Natalie Dykstra
Tuesday, October 29, 6:00 PM
Concord Free Public Library, Goodwin Forum
129 Main Street
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.
“A vivid portrait of the life and ambitions of one of the most famous Bostonians in history . . . Dykstra is just the writer and researcher to do justice to this story . . . Her thoroughly researched account of Gardner’s life is sure to be a hit whether you’re a history buff or just a lover of good storytelling. ”
“[An] exquisitely detailed and perceptive biography.”
“Sympathetic, impeccably researched.”
“Marshalling vivid facts, fluent insights, and narrative radiance, Dykstra fully captures Gardner’s dynamism, intrepidity, creativity, and singular achievements.”
“Captures the sweep and energy of [Gardner’s] life . . . A richly detailed biographical portrait.”
OTHER WORK
