Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Book Talk With Author Natalie Dykstra
March 25, 2025
1:00–2:00 PM
Location: CMA
Author Natalie Dykstra will discuss her recent book, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, a biography of the Boston art collector and museum founder.
A biographer relies on all kinds of evidence to reconstruct a life story: letters, diaries, financial and household documents, manuscripts, sketchbooks, photograph albums, and published material of all sorts. Even so, there are always gaps or silences in the record for a variety of reasons: the subject wanted to hide from history; the record was lost or destroyed; the evidence that remains is in some way illegible or resistant to reading. This resistant evidence is the subject of this talk, which asks what happens when a subject’s expressiveness is not with words either spoken or on the page, but with images or objects—or even with a collection. Can images or objects be as eloquent as words?
The event is free with registration.
A biographer relies on all kinds of evidence to reconstruct a life story: letters, diaries, financial and household documents, manuscripts, sketchbooks, photograph albums, and published material of all sorts. Even so, there are always gaps or silences in the record for a variety of reasons: the subject wanted to hide from history; the record was lost or destroyed; the evidence that remains is in some way illegible or resistant to reading. This resistant evidence is the subject of this talk, which asks what happens when a subject’s expressiveness is not with words either spoken or on the page, but with images or objects—or even with a collection. Can images or objects be as eloquent as words?
The event is free with registration.
