Isabel "Belle" Bowen Heyward (November 9, 1870 – October 20, 1926) was a patron of arts from Charleston.Queer Places:
7 Gibbes St, Charleston, SC 29401, Stati Uniti
Magnolia Cemetery, 70 Cunnington Ave, Charleston, SC 29405, Stati Uniti
Isabel "Belle" Bowen Heyward (November 9, 1870 – October 20, 1926) was a patron of arts from Charleston.
Isabel "Belle" Bowen Heyward was born on November 9, 1870, in Charleston, South Carolina, the daughter of William Milton Heyward (1842-1871) and Maria Elizabeth Faber (1842-1916).
Her grandparents were Daniel Heyward (1810–1888) and Ann Bull Maxcy (1813–1851), who were among the largest rice planters of antebellum South Carolina. Among her ancestors there are Thomas Heyward (1723–1795) and General Stephen Bull (c.1735–1800).
Isabel Bowen Heyward had a kind of poetry salon in the 1920s in Charleston. Other than Laura Bragg, who lived with her, the group included Helen von Kolnitz Hyer, Josephine Pinckney and Elizabeth Miles.
She donated the Henry Faber miniature by Charles Fraser to the Gibbes Museum of Art.
Isabel Bowen Heyward was rumored to be lesbian. She had a romantic friendship with Laura Bragg, later curator of the Charleston Museum, that would last until her death. By February 1915 they were living together at Heyward's home at 7 Gibbes Street, Charleston. Bragg wrote home: "Belle had made me one of the family and I am more comfortably situated than I have ever before been." The relantionship provided Bragg with an entrée into a social circle well-connected to the powerful political and economic leaders of the community. When Bragg left her for another woman, she died of gas poisoning and someone suggested she had committed suicide.
She died on October 20, 1926, and is buried at Magnolia Cemetery (Charleston, South Carolina).
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