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

“She had a great gift of finding out people’s interests and drawing them out.”

Lilla Cabot Perry,

Nocturne: Blue and Silver—Battersea Reach,

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

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.

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.”

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

also someone engaged in a deep, ambitious pursuit of knowledge and beauty.