Chasing Beauty - The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner

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."--

A propos de l'auteur

Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life. Her work on Isabella Stewart Gardner has won a Public Scholars Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities and an inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship sponsored by the Biographers International Organization (BIO). Dykstra, emerita professor of English at Hope College in Michigan, lives with her husband in Waltham, MA.  

Résumé

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.
 

Détails du produit

• Auteurs: Natalie Dykstra, Zoe Pagnamenta
• Edition: Harper Collins
• Langues: Anglais
• Format d'édition: Livre Relié
• Sortie: 19.03.2024
• EAN: 9781328515759
• ISBN: 978-1-328-51575-9
• Pages: 512
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 229 mm x 43 mm
• Poids: 669 g
• Catégories: Littérature spécialisée > Histoire > Autres; Sciences humaines, art, musique > Art > Général, dictionnaires; HISTORY / United States / 20th Century, HISTORY / Women, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, History of Art, Local History, United States of America, USA, Ethnic groups and multicultural studies, History of the Americas, Gender studies: women and girls, Biography: arts and entertainment, Biography: historical, political and military, US Northeast: New England, Museology and heritage studies, Exhibition catalogues and specific collections, HISTORY: 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY: Women, HISTORY: United States / 20th Century, Women's Studies / Women's History, History / 20th Century American