Goldfinch, by Rembrandt’s student Carel Fabritius,

Henry and Clover Adams,

the philosopher William James and his wife, Alice; and a thirty-one-year-old Edith Wharton, not yet a published author. Wharton’s and Gardner’s many interests—art, fashion, society, gardens, houses—overlapped. They were both from New York, and both had married Bostonians at the same Grace Church. But they would not be friends. The reasons were comp

The pageantry of Grace Church, a potent and exclusive joining of sacred music, belief, and beauty,

View of the Riva Degli Schiavoni and the Piazzetta,

inventions. Titian thought painting could do what poetry does—distill the great truths of life with image and color and rhythm and texture.

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

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

the New York decorator Elsie de Wolfe, later a friend, would write in her 1913 book The House in Good Taste: “A woman’s environment will speak for her life, whether she likes it or not.”