Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner

Lord Byron’s remark: “One who has not seen Seville has not seen wonder.”

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

original Velázquez to be found at Apsley House in London.

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

She made sense of her long life through far-reaching travel, avid collecting, and an all-consuming pursuit of beauty, which came to form the through line of her story.

Goldfinch, by Rembrandt’s student Carel Fabritius,

the detail that would come to define her: pursuit of beauty by way of collecting art.

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.”

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