Natalie Dykstra on Isabella Stewart Gardner, with Rachel Cohen, April 18, 2024, the Graduate Center

Natalie Dykstra on Isabella Stewart Gardner
in conversation with Rachel Cohen
Thursday, April 18, 6:30 pm
Elebash Recital Hall, the Graduate Center
365 5th Ave. New York, NY 10016
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. 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.
Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life. Her work on Isabella Stewart Gardner has won a Public Scholars grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Biographers International Organization (BIO) Inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship. Dykstra, emerita professor of English at Hope College in Michigan, lives with her husband in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Rachel Cohen is the author of three books of nonfiction: Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, and A Chance Meeting, which is being reissued for its 20th anniversary by New York Review of Books Classics. Cohen's essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The Believer and The New York Times, among other publications, and her work has been included in Best American Essays and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and is Professor of Practice in the Arts in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Chicago.
Co-sponsored by Public Programs