Isabella Stewart Gardner was ‘the brightest, breeziest woman in Boston’

Isabella Stewart Gardner, the novelist Henry James once said, “is not a woman, she is a locomotive - with a Pullman car attached.’’ It was James who introduced her to John Singer Sargent, two of whose portraits of her hang in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. He considered himself a friend. Imagine how Gardner’s detractors must have felt. Gardner was that vivid a personality.