Isabel Cooper and the Jungle Room A three-part sub-series on the guest room that Isabel Cooper painted for Dorothy Putnam in 1925
Painting murals was soon to become another professional skill and means of income for Isabel Cooper. It’s tempting to give credit to Dorothy Putnam and Eleanor the Snake for this. But even before she completed the Jungle Room at Dorothy’s Rye, New York house, Isabel was hearing from the head of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn, whom she called “the dear old president of the American Museum.” Isabel wrote Charles Mahaffie that Osborn had asked her to “go abroad and study mural painting and do some of the walls of the new buildings of the museum…”1)Letter IC to CDM, July 22, 1925.
She continued, “it doesn’t seem any good for me to say that I don’t feel properly talented for such an enterprise.” Before long, Osborn got her to paint the murals, though she did not go first abroad to study mural painting.2)Letter IC to CDM, July 22, 1925.
The following year, she became a mural painter for commissions won by muralist Ezra Winter, for several prominent public buildings, including the Birmingham, Alabama central library and Cornell University’s student union. For more on her work with Ezra Winter, see this post.
A coda for Eleanor, the Jungle Room, and the Rye Putnam mansion
A house, likely with at least some of the bones of the 1925 Putnam home, still stands at 349 Locust Avenue, in Rye.3)Paul Hicks, “Amelia Earhart’s Time in Rye, Part II,” Rye Record, November 12, 2024, https://ryerecord.com/amelia-earharts-rye-part-ii/
That house today is worth, according to realty websites, almost five million dollars.4)Redfin.com estimated value, June 2026. But it no longer includes the Jungle Room and Undersea Room.
I have found no further record of the decorative painting work by Cooper and Donald Blanding in the Rye house. Likely, Isabel and Donald’s murals are long gone, painted over, or lost to removed and relocated walls.
More on what became of the Putnam Rye house and the two painted rooms may be found here.
Isabel Cooper’s retirement from paid art
Marrying Charles Mahaffie in August 1928 (more on Charles is found here.) led to Isabel no longer doing artistic work for pay. And she made a complete retirement of it. She was 36 years old, and would be moving to Washington, DC. For a short time, she completed promised illustration work for the Encyclopedia Britannica, but she took no more gigs.
She would now have a wholly different life. Isabel embraced the change. She swapped exploration for engaging with DC society, the wife of a government official. She made, in her way, an adventure of that.
Isabel’s Legacy as an artist and a mythologized forebear
Isabel Cooper Mahaffie died in January 1984 at 93 years. She had, at the time, 7 grandchildren and four great grandchildren. (She now has seventeen great grandchildren and two great great grandchildren.) Many of her seven grandchildren spent time with her and remember her wit, intelligence, stories, and style. A grand niece likewise remembers her well, having made of Isabel a mentor as she came of age in the 1970s.
Only a few of us still remember her vividly. But for all of her descendants, she is an iconic figure, with stories, paintings, shared memories, and images worthy of becoming, for some, tattooed body art.
We owe her thanks for urging all of us on to our enthusiasms, to take on life, to adventure, to go places. Her legacy in all that is powerful and will continue.
Isabel’s scientific art was so distinctive that at least one of her grandchildren and four of her great grandchildren have versions of it in tattoos. I think she would find this delightful and hysterical.
For a complete list of posts on this site about Isabel Cooper, see the series here.
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