mrs. jack

the above image by john singer sargent is a portrait of boston’s grande dame isabella stewart gardner, here is another:

Mrs. Gardner didn’t drink tea; she drank beer… She didn’t go sleigh-riding; instead, she went walking down Tremont Street with a lion named Rex on a leash.

She gave at-homes at her Beacon Street house and received her guests from a perch in the lower branches of a mimosa tree. Told that “everybody in Boston” was either a Unitarian or an Episcopalian, she became a Buddhist; then when the pleasure of that shock had worn off she became such a High-Church Episcoplaian that her religion differed from Catholicism only in respect to allegiance to the Pope.

Advised that the best people Boston belonged to clubs, she formed one of her own named the “It” Club…Warned that a woman’s social position in Boston might be judged in inverse ratio to her appearance…she picked out her two largest diamonds, had them set on gold wire springs and wore them waving some six inches above her hair like the antennae of a butterfly.

__

from: the proper bostonians by cleveland amory (1947).