A portrait both of a lady and of a glittering era, Natalie Dykstra’s “Chasing Beauty” draws from Gardner’s travelogues, scrapbooks and few surviving letters to track her subject’s expanding sensibilities as an art collector. Dykstra, the author of an acclaimed biography of Clover Adams, astutely situates her subject within Gardner’s growing web of connections: expatriates, artists and scholars.
Privilege didn’t inure the Gardners to tragedy: In 1865, their toddler son, John III, died of pneumonia. Belle’s grief metastasized into severe depression when, following a miscarriage, she was told not to make further attempts to have children. When a doctor suggested she travel abroad, Belle was so frail that she had to be carried onto the boat on a cot. (Ten years later, they would take over guardianship of their three nephews after Jack’s brother, Joe, shot himself; his wife had died in childbirth.)
Among her longstanding friendships was one with Henry James, who may have based several characters on her, wrote her obsequious letters and gossiped about her behind her back — though he was socially generous, introducing her to John Singer Sargent.
Sargent painted two extraordinary portraits of Gardner, the first of which depicts her head-on, wasp-waisted and a little bosomy in a black dress — so risqué, in the context of puritanical Boston, that it was hung in Jack’s private office. After Fenway Court opened, Sargent became its first artist in residence.
Gardner became serious about collecting after attending the impassioned lectures of Charles Eliot Norton, Harvard’s first professor of art history. Norton took Gardner’s intellectual curiosities seriously, advising her to invest in art and rare manuscripts rather than couture and jewels. “He knew, as Belle was beginning to know, how beauty can meet loss, how aesthetic experience assuages,” Dykstra writes, noting that Norton was mourning the death of his wife.
