Portrait d'Isabella Stewart Gardner

John Singer Sargent painted this in the winter of 1887 and 1888, working for nearly two months in the Boston home of his sitter, the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. She stands frontally against a swirling patterned cloth, a rope of pearls slung low around her waist. When it was shown at Boston's St. Botolph Club in 1888, the city was scandalized. A man reportedly joked that the neckline let you see all the way to Crawford's Notch, a mountain pass far to the north. Her husband Jack took the painting home and refused to let it be exhibited again in his lifetime. Gardner eventually hung it in the Gothic Room of the museum she built in Boston, a room she kept closed to visitors for as long as she lived.