The artist Isabel Cooper painted Eleanor the Snake on the wall of her Jungle Room, designed and painted for her friend Dorothy Putnam, in 1925. The room was in Putnam’s new home in Rye, New York.
Eleanor was a boa constrictor. Isabel had painted boas from live specimens in British Guiana. A feature article explained her work and methods:
In her right hand she held a camel’s-hair paintbrush. The fingers of her left hand were gripped about the neck of a large snake. It was a beautiful snake; on its skin there was an iridescent sheen which flickered from burnt orange to green—all of the colors of the rainbow. In fact, the name of the snake was the rainbow boa constrictor. From time to time, the girl placed a magnifying glass to the head and eyes of the serpent as she transferred the minute details of coloring to the white cardboard.2)John Monk Saunders, “Jungle Creatures ‘Sit’ for Her in Their Own Back Yards,” American Illustrated Magazine. United States, Crowell-Collier Publishing Company, February 1926.
Rainbow boas, in several species, are members of the reptile genus epicrates. They live in jungles and sometimes savannas in Central and northern South American. The snakes reach 4 to 6 feet in length. They can climb trees.
Isabel had much to do with snakes during her time in the tropics, and came away with a close sense of them. She seemed to ward off interviewers’ promptings that snakes must be scary or awful in some way:
“You haven’t any idea how interesting and how beautiful snakes, and lizards, and all the rest of them are. You would get used to the actual feel of them in no time. The only way to pose them is to hold them still with one hand, and draw them with the other.”4)Mildred Adams, “The Jungle Lady,” The Woman’s Journal, March 25, 1922, p. 11.
Isabel spoke at length about snakes to an interviewer:6)Charles Samuels, “Girl Artist Penetrates Jungle and Goes Under Sea,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 18, 1925.
“It is the same thing with snakes. They are supposed to be the worst tempered and most vicious enemies man has. Why, those creatures are so lazy for the most part they won’t even move unless they are hungry or frightened. Furthermore, there are only four kinds of poisonous snakes–the bush master, the South American rattler, the fer-de lance and the coral. Most of the others bite, but their stings aren’t poisonous. Take the tree snakes, for example. Their teeth are so tiny they could not possibly hurt you.”
…
“I helped catch a boa constrictor once!” Miss Cooper exclaimed with pardonable pride.
“It was down in the Galapagos Islands. The native boys located it, coiled on a log, and told Mr. Beebe. With Ruth Rose, his secretary, and myself, he went out, grabbed the boa by the neck and put a bag over its head. Then we had to sit on him so he couldn’t get away. With the help of a couple of native boys we carried him into camp. You see, as soon as you put a bag over a snake’s head, you have deprived him of his only weapon.”
NOTE: Someone got this wrong here, the famous “girl” capture of the boa was in Kartabo, British Guiana in 1923 or 1924. Isabel and two women colleagues at the Department of Tropical Research camp captured the boa. It was widely reported in the newspapers because of the women angle on the story.
“The boa is another variety of snake whose strength is greatly overestimated. They can’t squeeze you to death by coiling around you. They can only do that to very small animals.”
In any case, Isabel was primed and ready to paint the big snake Dorothy Putnam asked for. And once resigned to adding it to her design for the Jungle Room, she had plenty of inspiration to draw on. For posts on the Jungle Room, and how it came about, see the Isabel Cooper collection of blog posts, here.
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