Portrait of a Lady

Between the world wars, a beautiful, artistic woman named Bobsy Goodspeed stood at the heart of Chicago's social and cultural scenes. Now, prompted by a salacious if glancing remark in a recent book, this forgotten woman re-emerges and opens the door on a vanished era peopled by painters and pianists, plutocrats and politicians—and an irresistible force named Gertrude Stein

By Geoffrey Johnson

(page 8 of 8)

Chagall's The Circus Rider, top, and Picasso's Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler were both given to the Art Institute by Bobsy

On October 28, 1950, Elizabeth Fuller Goodspeed wed Gilbert Whipple Chapman, a wealthy New York industrialist and widower, and decamped for Manhattan and Long Island. "While happy in her happiness," wrote the Tribune, "[Chicago socialites] are wondering what one person can be found to take over all her activities." Somehow the city endured.

The public persona known as Bobsy Goodspeed did not fare so well. With her remarriage and move east, that vivid Chicago personality began to evaporate, slowly displaced by the nebulous Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman. In 1970, the documentary filmmaker Perry Miller Adato released When This You See, Remember Me, a biography of Gertrude Stein (the film's title was borrowed from a refrain in Four Saints). About 71 minutes into the film, a prim white-haired woman appears on screen; she is identified in a subtitle as "Mrs. Gilbert Chapman, Arts Patron." Wearing large pearl earrings as well as two strands of pearls over an unremarkable blue dress, the woman phlegmatically describes the surprising "furor of publicity" that had surrounded Stein's 1934 arrival in the United States. There is no charm floating beneath her flat voice and certainly no mischievous light dancing in her opaque eyes.

On December 16, 1979, Gilbert Chapman died in his Manhattan home; his wife, Elizabeth, followed nine months later. She was 87. The New York Times acknowledged her death only perfunctorily; locally, the Tribune noted the passing of the onetime Chicago arts patron Elizabeth Chapman. Her first husband, Charles B. Goodspeed, warranted a brief mention, but there's not the slightest allusion to anyone named Bobsy.

In early March 1981, a New York auction house sold off Mrs. Chapman's artwork, jewelry, antique furniture, silver, and books. The sale netted $803,545. Of course Elizabeth Chapman had already given away several of her most important paintings. At least four of them had gone to the Art Institute of Chicago: Chagall's The Circus Rider, Matisse's Interior at Nice, Braque's Still Life, and Picasso's cubist portrait of his trailblazing art dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. The last two gifts are dedicated to the memory of Charles Barnett Goodspeed. As for Bobsy, her most lasting memorial remains a recipe for turtle soup.

Photography: Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago