Natalie Dykstra - Chasing Beauty

Thu Mar 13 2025 at 07:00 pm to 08:00 pm UTC-04:00

Solid State Books | Washington

Solid State Books
Publisher/HostSolid State Books
Natalie Dykstra - Chasing Beauty
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A vivid & masterful story of Isabella Stewart Gardner, an American original whose own life was remade by art.
About this Event

Join us for an exciting evening with Natalie Dykstra, as she discusses her book, Chasing Beauty, a masterful story of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Gardner created of one of America’s most stunning museums, and both are true American originals.


This in-person event will be held at Solid State Books. Don't miss out!


Tickets with AND without a book are available.

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.



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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.


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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Solid State Books, 600F H Street Northeast, Washington, United States

Tickets

USD 0.00 to USD 25.54

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