The vivid and masterful story of Isabella Stewart Gardner—creator of one of America’s most stunning museums—an American original whose own life was remade by art. Includes archival photos of Isabella’s world, museum, and the art she collected.Marfield Prize WinnerIsabella Stewart Gardner’s museum, with its plain exterior enfolding an astonishing four-story Italian palazzo, ...

A biography of one of the Gilded Age's most fascinating and mysterious society women that "reads as well as any page-turning novel" ( Library Journal).At twenty-eight, Clover Adams, a fiercely intelligent Boston Brahmin, married the soon-to-be-eminent American historian Henry Adams. She thrived in her role as an intimate of power brokers in Gilded Age Washington, where she was admired for her wit and taste by such luminaries as Henry James, H. H. Richardso...

The vivid and masterful story of Isabella Stewart Gardner—creator of one of America’s most stunning museums—an American original whose own life was remade by art.Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum, with its plain exterior enfolding an astonishing four-story Italian palazzo, rose from Boston’s Fens at the turn of the twentieth century. Its treasures encompassed not only masterwork paintings but tapestries, rare books, prints, porcela...