Long forgotten, American sculptor Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) successfully challenged the role of women to become one of the most popular artists of the nineteenth century, but she had to leave the country to do so.
Early Life
After losing her mother and three siblings to tuberculosis, Harriett’s physician father encouraged his last remaining child to pursue vigorous outdoor activities including horseback riding, fishing, and hunting, stuffing many of the animals she killed. She spent many hours in a clay pit modeling animals and figures and determined she would be a sculptor. A wild child, she was expelled from three schools until her father enrolled her in a progressive girl’s school where she excelled.
To learn the structure of the human body she studied anatomy at the Missouri Medical College. In 1852, urged on by her friend, actress Charlotte Cushman, she sailed to Rome the only place women could study sculpture and work from the nude model. There she studied under Welsh sculptor John Gibson.
As her reputation grew, she became part of an American expatriate group of writers and artists that included, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Thackery, George Elliot, George Sand, the Brownings, and a surprising number of female sculptors, including Edmonia Lewis, Anne Whitney, and Vinnie Ream. These female sculptors were later immortalized by Henry James as the “white marmorean flock.”
In Rome, Harriet dressed in men’s clothing and, taken for a boy, was able to ride through the streets and pursue activities on her own that a woman would not have been allowed. In 1868, she formed a romantic relationship with Lady Louisa Ashburton, which lasted twenty-five years.
“She was very peculiar, but she seemed to be her actual self, and nothing affected or made up; so that, for my part, I gave her full leave to wear what may suit her best, and to behave as her inner woman prompts.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, c. 1858
Career
Considered the foremost female sculptor of her time, Hosmer favored the neoclassical style popular in the nineteenth century and specialized in mythological and classical poses featuring mostly women. What made her work popular was the level of emotion and romanticism her works embodied. She also is credited with inventing artificial marble made from ground limestone and a new lost wax method.
In 1857, she was commissioned to make a sculpture for sixteen-year-old Judith Falconnet’s tomb in Basilica Sant’ Andrea delle Fratte Church in Rome. It was the first sculpture by an American, male or female, installed in a Roman Church.
Other well-known works are Medusa, Puck, and Thomas Hart Benton, which was Missouri’s first public sculpture.
Medusa
Puck
Thomas Hart Benson
In Her Own Words
And now I am moved to say a word in favor of sculpture being a far higher art than painting. There is something in the purity of the marble, in the perfect calmness, if one may say so, of a beautiful statue, which cannot be found in painting. I mean if you have the same figure copied in marble and also on the canvas. People talk of the want of expression in marble, when it is capable of a thousand times more than canvas. If color is wanting, you have form, and there is dignity with its rigidity. One thing is certain, that it requires a longer practice and truer study, to be able to appreciate sculpture as well as one may painting. I grant that the painter must be as scientific as the sculptor, and in general must possess a greater variety of knowledge, and what he produces is more easily understood by the mass, because what they see on canvas is most frequently to be observed in nature. In high sculpture it is not so. A great thought must be embodied in a great manner, and such greatness is not to find its counterpart in everyday things. That is the reason why Michael Angelo [sic] is so little understood, and will account for a remark which I heard a lady make, a short time since, that “she wondered they had those two awful looking things in the Athenaeum, of ‘Day ‘ and ‘Night;’ why don’t they take them away and put up something decent.”
Excerpt from a letter to Miss C by Harriet Hosmer, Watertown, NY 1851
Harriet Hosmer Letters and Memories 1912, pp 14-15
Her works
- 1852 Hesper: The Evening Star
- 1852 Doctor McDowell
- 1853 Clasped Hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- 1853 Medusa
- 1853 Daphne
- 1855 Puck
- 1855 Oenone
- 1857 Zenobia in Chains: Queen of Palmyra
- 1857 Lady Constance Talbot
- 1857 Beatrice
- 1858 Tomb of Judith Faconnet
- 1858 The Fountain of the Hylas and the Water Nymphs
- 1861 The Fountain of the Siren
- 1862 Thomas Hart Benton
- 1864 Gate for an Art Gallery
- 1865 A Sleeping Faun
- 1866 Portrait of Wayman Crow
- 1866 A Waking Faun
- 1868 Lincoln Memorial, sometimes known as “Freedmen’s Monument”
- 1868 Queen of Naples,
- 1878 Sentinel of Pompeii
- 1896 Lincoln Memorial – The African Sibyl
- 1892 Dolphin Fountain
Zenobia in Chains
Harriet Hosmer’s Writings
Harriet Hosmer Letters and Memories by Harriet Hosmer, 1912.
More About Harriet Hosmer
Blazing A Trail: The Unconventional Life of Harriet Hosmer by Barbara Kailean Welsh, 2017.
Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography by Kate Culkin, 2010.
Harriet Hosmer, American Sculptor, 1830-1908 by: Dolly Sherwood, 1991.
Harriet Hosmer, Lost and Found: A Catalogue Raisonné by Patricia Cronin, 2009.
“I honor every woman who has strength enough to step out of the beaten path when she feels that her walk lies in another.”
Harriet Hosmer
