It’s hard to not feel like there’s a ghost in the room.

The Gardner– Isabella Stewart Gardner’s private collection and home, now museum is my favorite place in the Boston. However, it was Mrs. Jack’s first Boston home in Back Bay from which I live very close, and from which I read this book. I couldn’t help but feeling like I had her visiting– like a parlor apparition– as I lit a candle on my mantle, just doors away from where she would have done the same. Pouring over letters and books, dreaming about art and how the special collection around her, objects from near and far, brought comfort. In that sense, it makes me inseparable from her.

Mrs. Gardner had an intense energy that still fills this city. Quiet but intense. As evident, and I would think expertly captured, in the above Sargent portrait which resides at the museum today. She was entirely her own force and carved her way into a curated lifestyle that was equally her comfort and protection yet one she meant to share. Having recently read Natalie Dykstra‘s book “Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner” I’ve grown even more enamored by her. She had a fierce sense of adventure and a life of equally deep sadness. What she lost in family drove her deeper into her travels and appreciation of arts and artists. Incredibly well researched, this book carefully unfolds Isabella’s entire life’s journey from her younger years as little girl in NYC and schooling abroad, to her final, tender moments at her home in Boston. Dykstra’s account honorably uncovered Isabella’s sense of self and also her desire to constantly absorb and expand her knowledge of the world through experience and objects of art she acquired along the way. It was particularly intriguing to learn of the deeper relationship she had to artist John Singer Sargent and writer Henry James, among other scholars at Harvard and beyond, who at the time were trying to carve a place in higher academia for Art History. More than a collector, truly supporting art movement in different circles.

Isabella wasn’t the type who was scared to set the world on fire with her unique (especially for the times) sense of style and perhaps scandal– too confident to be blown off course from gossip. I admired this book’s account of her life and her seeming progressive energy, no matter how dark the storm. Isabella Gardner was a perseverant and pioneering spirit full of style that dedicated her life and legacy to support the arts.

“Everything here is a remembrance. The seeing, purchasing, having, arranging, and admiring: all of it was filled with memories of chasing beauty.”

I’m always interested by the way in which people live their lives. What they choose to devote their energy and passion towards. May this book inspire you to bring beauty into your own life not necessarily by grand material, but simple splendors– books, some flowers, a handwritten letter. And share. There is an art in that too.

x B