Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner

The trees, from my window, look like peridots, with an occasional vivid emerald—so fresh and green.” Beauty, always beauty, saved the day.

The Great War turned out to be the cataclysm that undid the Victorian world as Isabella and her generation had known it.

The Armory Show would showcase artists most Americans had never seen before, including Brancusi, Braque, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Picasso, and Matisse. American artists would be represented too, such as the Ashcan School painters George Bellows and Robert Henri,

she was “a wrinkled old fairy all the same.”

original Velázquez to be found at Apsley House in London.

Lilla Perry had met Claude Monet in 1889, and for two decades she spent several months every summer in a rented house next door to the artist’s studio and gardens at Giverny, fifty miles west of Paris along the Seine.

Lilla Cabot Perry,

Isabella invited John Singer Sargent to be the museum’s inaugural artist in residence for the spring of 1903,

Poldi Pezzoli, the house museum in Milan.