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

Velázquez had the uncanny power to make it seem as if the person pictured was looking right back at the viewer.

Pater urged a direct response to art, emphasizing feeling and intensity and beauty in his articulation of aestheticism’s nineteenth-century rallying cry: “art for art’s sake.”

Norton quoted too from Emerson and his essay “On Beauty,” but more than Emerson and other Americans, Norton had been influenced by two Englishmen, the philosopher John Stuart Mill and the art critic John Ruskin. Mill’s claim that the study of art was on par with an intellectual and moral education had been part of Norton’s argument to Harvard when

the shape of a house by a mind recalling likings and the memories of the past.”

She told him at one point, rather grandly, that instead of “building hospitals, I am going to try to make the world more beautiful.”

To reach the ancient ruins of the Khmer Empire, the largest religious complex in the world, they’d go first by riverboat as far inland as possible, and then farther into the jungle by bullock carts and elephants.

He had an astonishing visual memory, wide cultural references, and a graceful style on the page.

original Velázquez to be found at Apsley House in London.