Courting Scandal
Isabella smoked cigarettes, and the newspaper ran stories claiming she had taken zoo lions for a stroll in the park. A dahlia bears her name, and so does a mountain peak in Washington. She once shocked all of Boston Society by showing up to the Boston Symphony Orchestra bearing a headband that declared, "Oh you Red Sox." She invited the Harvard Football team to her home after they beat Yale. She hosted a boxing match at her home and, while the men fought, she danced. She had two large diamonds attached to wires and wore them bouncing in her hair. At the opening of her museum, she served champagne and donuts. The woman courted the world, and the world courted the woman.
Henry James, a member of her coterie, once remarked that Isabella "is not a woman, she is a locomotive—with a Pullman car attached." James often made such underhanded compliments about Isabella, yet he constantly found himself drawn to her. He didn't think she was particularly intelligent. He found her to be a little too forceful, yet he wrote, "how fond of her one always is for the perfect terms one is on with her, her admirable ease, temper and facilite a vivre." As Vigderman told me in an interview, "Whatever else she was, Isabella was fun." The essayist John Jay Chapman described her as "a fairy in a machine shop." The famous Sargent painting of her—in a long black dress, with just the hint of cleavage and a patterned background that lends her both a halo and a crown—shocked Bostonians so much that her husband asked that she not have it displayed. After he died, she put it up in the Gothic room, where it looms high over all the other paintings. Her glowing skin seems to hover away from the canvas.
But that is Isabella through the eyes of others—men. Her art and her museum are the only way to see her the way she wanted to be seen. "C'est mon plaisir" is the motto that sits above her museum: This is my pleasure. This is my delight.
And yet, her narrative thread of whatever story she is telling is hard to follow. Vigderman writes in her book, which seeks to access and understand Isabella, "Isabella Gardner appears not to wish me to complete her. Burning her private papers, exerting control over the future of each piece in her collection, she does not want to be a character in my story."
