
Chasing Beauty
The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner
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Narrated by:
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Maggi-Meg Reed
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By:
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Natalie Dykstra
About this listen
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.
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.
Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2024 Natalie Dykstra and Zoe Pagnamenta (P)2024 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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Jean Strouse's Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers looks at twelve portraits of one English family painted by the expatriate American artist at the height of his career—and at the intersections of all these lives with the sparkle and strife of the Edwardian age.
By: Jean Strouse
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The Story of Art Without Men
- By: Katy Hessel
- Narrated by: Katy Hessel
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? Did women even work as artists before the twentieth century? And what is the Baroque anyway? Guided by Katy Hessel, art historian and founder of @thegreatwomenartists, discover the glittering paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century United States, and the artist who really invented the "readymade." Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of postwar artists in Latin America, and the women defining art in the 2020s.
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Great book, no pdf?
- By Amazon Customer on 08-11-24
By: Katy Hessel
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The Gardner Heist
- The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft
- By: Ulrich Boser
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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After the death of famed art detective Harold Smith, reporter Ulrich Boser decided to take up the case. Exploring Smith's unfinished leads, Boser travels deep into the art underworld and comes across a remarkable cast of characters, including a brilliant rock 'n' roll thief, a gangster who professes his innocence in rhyming verse, and the enigmatic late Boston heiress Isabella Stewart Gardner herself. Boser becomes increasingly obsessed with the case and eventually uncovers startling new evidence about the identities of the thieves.
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Loved it!
- By Amanda D. on 05-21-19
By: Ulrich Boser
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The Slip
- The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever
- By: Prudence Peiffer
- Narrated by: Melissa Redmond
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world.
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The narrator mis-pronounces everones name
- By Stephanie Laffont on 12-26-23
By: Prudence Peiffer
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All That Glitters
- A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art
- By: Orlando Whitfield
- Narrated by: Orlando Whitfield
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Orlando Whitfield and Inigo Philbrick met in 2006 at London’s Goldsmiths University where they became best friends. By 2007 they had started I&O Fine Art. Orlando would eventually set up his own gallery and watch as Inigo quickly immersed himself in a world of private jets and multimillion-dollar deals for major clients. Inigo seemed brilliant, but underneath the extravagant façade, his complicated financial schemes were unraveling. With debt, lawsuits, and court summonses piling up, Inigo went into a tailspin of lies and subterfuge.
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Gripping
- By Anonymous User on 09-01-24
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Picasso's War
- How Modern Art Came to America
- By: Hugh Eakin
- Narrated by: Mack Sanderson
- Length: 15 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In January 1939, Pablo Picasso was renowned in Europe but disdained by many in the United States. One year later, Americans across the country were clamoring to see his art. How did the controversial leader of the Paris avant-garde break through to the heart of American culture? The answer begins a generation earlier, when a renegade Irish American lawyer named John Quinn set out to build the greatest collection of Picassos in existence. His dream of a museum to house them died with him, until it was rediscovered by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
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Better Books on Picasso Available
- By john burke on 08-17-22
By: Hugh Eakin
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Rembrandt Is in the Wind
- Learning to Love Art Through the Eyes of Faith
- By: Russ Ramsey, Makoto Fujimura
- Narrated by: Zach Hoffman, John Behrens
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Striving for beauty, art also reveals what is broken. It presents us with the tremendous struggles and longings common to the human experience. And it says a lot about our Creator too. Great works of art can speak to the soul in a unique way. Rembrandt Is in the Wind is an invitation to discover some of the world's most celebrated artists and works and how each of them illuminates something about God, people, and the purpose of life. Part art history, part biblical study, part philosophy, and part analysis of the human experience, this book is nonetheless all story.
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Creating Beauty as Our Lifework
- By Anonymous User on 07-02-22
By: Russ Ramsey, and others
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The Streets of Paris
- A Guide to the City of Light Following in the Footsteps of Famous Parisians Throughout History
- By: Susan Cahill
- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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For hundreds of years, the City of Light has set the stage for larger-than-life characters-from medieval lovers Heloïse and Abelard to the defiant King Henri IV to the brilliant scientist Madame Curie, beloved chanteuse Edith Piaf, and the writer Colette. In this book, Susan Cahill recounts the lives of 22 famous Parisians and then takes you through the seductive streets of Paris to the quartiers where they lived and worked: the scenes of their greatest triumphs and tragedies, their favorite cafes, bars, and restaurants, and the places where they found inspiration and love.
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I feel there should be a pdf.
- By Matthew Spinola on 09-20-21
By: Susan Cahill
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The Grand Affair
- John Singer Sargent in His World
- By: Paul Fisher
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 17 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is an abiding enigma. He scandalized viewers with the frankness and sensuality of his work, while dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona. In The Grand Affair, scholar Paul Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siecle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.
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Not what I expected.
- By Anonymous User on 04-19-23
By: Paul Fisher
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Margaret Fuller
- A New American Life
- By: Megan Marshall
- Narrated by: Cynthia Barrett
- Length: 19 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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From an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New England’s intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal the Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters "discovered" three fascinating women, has done it again: No biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.
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good and insufferable
- By Bonnie Smith on 01-19-18
By: Megan Marshall
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Lee Miller
- A Life
- By: Carolyn Burke
- Narrated by: Ann Richardson
- Length: 18 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Carolyn Burke reveals Miller as a multifaceted woman: both model and photographer, muse and reporter, sexual adventurer and mother, and, in later years, gourmet cook - the last of the many dramatic transformations she underwent during her lifetime. A sleek blond bombshell, Miller was part of a glamorous circle in New York and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s as a leading Vogue model, close to Edward Steichen, Charlie Chaplin, Jean Cocteau, and Pablo Picasso. Then, during World War II, she became a war correspondent - one of the first women to do so.
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A Unique and Beautiful Person
- By Cindy A. Ossias on 03-21-24
By: Carolyn Burke
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The Dress Diary
- Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe
- By: Kate Strasdin
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments—some her own, others donated by family and friends—she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of their lives. Her name was Mrs. Anne Sykes. Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Using her expertise, Strasdin spent the next six years unraveling the secrets contained within the album's pages, and the lives of the people within.
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Fascinating History
- By Cpm405 on 01-09-24
By: Kate Strasdin
Mrs Jack , America's greatest art collector .
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A Very Strong Woman
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The details of the portraits
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The best narrator I have ever listened to on an Audible!
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Sensory delight for fine art lovers
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A chronology
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Great story about Isabella Stewart Gardner the art collector and human
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Fascinating read
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Interesting historical aspects.
The span of generations who remained connected thru many years was an example of accomplishment .
Depth of story
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A Tour of the Gilded Age focusing on the remarkable art collector Elizabeth Stuart Gardner
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