Born: 9 October 1830, United States
Died: 21 February 1908
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Harriet Hosmer.
Not just one of her country’s first significant female and gay artists, Hosmer was, with Edmonia Lewis, one of the two leading American sculptors of her generation. Her position as the foremost female sculptor went unchallenged during her lifetime, and she would become a role model for other female sculptors and artists then and since. Working in the Neoclassical style, her work ranged from portrait bust tributes, to life-sized figures. Hosmer lived the majority of her adult life in Rome, establishing her own studio in the city and becoming part of a colony of prominent artistic expatriates that included fellow Americans Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry James.
Childhood and Education
Hosmer was born in Watertown, Massachusetts, to loving parents, Hiram and Sarah Hosmer. Sadly, her childhood would be beset with tragedy and loss. By the time she was five years old, tuberculosis had claimed the life of her two younger brothers and her beloved mother. And despite her physician father encouraging Harriet and her older sister, Sarah, to play outside, and to stay strong and healthy through exercise, Harriet lost her sister to the same disease that had taken her brothers before Harriet had reached her teens.
With little else to occupy her time, the young Hatty (the childhood name by which she went) made the most of her semi-rural surroundings. She took naturally to hunting, fishing, horseback riding, and swimming and rowing, on the nearby Charles River. Historian Andrea Moore Kerr writes, “Dr. Hosmer became convinced that a vigorous, unconstrained outdoor life was indispensable to the health, and perhaps survival, of his remaining child. He furnished young Hatty with a pistol, a horse, a dog, and a small, silver-prowed gondola with velvet seats, and he encouraged her to explore nature. Hatty obliged, spending much of her time out of doors and filling her room with wild creatures she had killed and stuffed”.
Hosmer was a mischief-maker and courted trouble from an early age. She found it difficult to integrate with others in her community and was expelled from three schools. However, as Kerr explains, “Hosmer’s stubborn individuality and creative energy found an outlet in her ‘secret studio,’ a clay pit beneath a riverbank, where she modelled horses, dogs, sheep, women, and men, for hours on end”. She also became a “crack shot” and well known “for her daredevil stunts on horseback and for her dexterity with bow and arrow. In an era of conformity in which young ladies were expected to spend their time in learning needlework, music, and the art of conversation, Hatty Hosmer was widely – and unfavorably – regarded as ‘eccentric'”.
Recognizing that his daughter probably needed more structure in her life, Hosmer’s father sent her away to Mrs. Charles (Elizabeth) Sedgwick’s School for Girls when she was sixteen. Located in Lenox, Massachusetts, Hosmer found herself in a progressive school that taught Latin, French and “hygiene”, and fostered in the girls the idea of female independence. Elizabeth Sedgwick later referred to Hosmer as “the most difficult pupil to manage that I ever saw”, but one she also “learned to love so well”. Hosmer and her fellow classmates, including Cornelia Crow, the daughter of the future founder of Washington University, Wayman Crow, were encouraged to express themselves freely in all pursuits, and to learn from the attitudes of female role models such as the writer, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, and the actress, Fanny Kemble. It was at the School that Hosmer was likely fully awakened to her sexual preference for girls.
Early Training
In 1849 Hosmer returned home from school ready to fully embrace her desire to become a professional sculptor. Author Kate Culkin states, “it was a startling decision, as there was not a strong tradition of American female sculptors to provide inspiration and unlike painting or writing, sculpting required physical strength and a public performance of labor, making it especially controversial for a woman”. But as Kerr suggests, “her dreams may have been helped along by the [Boston] Atheneum’s acquisition in 1848 of its first sculpture by a woman, a bust of Robert Rantoul done by Joanna Quiner, an older woman who lived in nearby Beverly, Massachusetts”. She enrolled first in lessons with sculptor Peter Stephenson in Boston, but quickly realized she needed to study anatomy if she was to stand any chance of making her mark professionally in the field.
In autumn 1850, Hosmer traveled to St. Louis to visit her old school friend, Cornelia Crow. Taking up temporary residence at the Crow household, and, with the help of Cornelia’s father (Wayman) she gained admission to the University of Missouri’s Medical College where she studied anatomy under the tutelage of Dr. Joseph Nash. At college, Hosmer also gained attention for her unique fashion sense. As Culkin explains, “each morning, dressed in a brown bonnet that became her trademark while in St. Louis, she walked the two miles from Crow’s house to the school on Eight and Gratiot, mud gathering at the hem of her dress. Reports circulated that she carried a pistol hidden in her skirts”.
Despite being fully committed to her anatomy program, Hosmer was unable to suppress her adventurous spirit, and in 1851, undertook a steamboat trip down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. The voyage was notable for a stop at Lansing, Iowa. This famous episode in her biography is eloquently described here by historian Maria Popova:
“A steamboat is puffing up the Mississippi River, approaching a bluff towering above the shore, not far from where a steamboat pilot named Samuel Clemens would pick up his pen name Mark Twain a decade later. Bored and brazen, the young men aboard boast that they can reach the top of the bluff. One scoffs that if women weren’t such poor climbers, the ladies in the party could join them. Harriet Hosmer thrusts her hands into her pockets and a mischievous smile lifts her chin as she proposes a foot race, wagering that she can reach the summit before any of the boys. A spectator to the scene would later remember her as ‘a gay, romping, athletic schoolgirl.’ The captain, amused, banks the boat, and off they all go. Harriet – Hatty to those who love her – slices through changing altitudinal zones of vegetation up the five hundred feet of elevation above the river, dashing through the virgin pine forest, charging through the bramble, and scrambling up the jagged rock to triumph first atop the summit, waving a victorious handkerchief. The captain, with amusement transmuted into astonishment, christens the bluff Mount Hosmer – a name it bears to this day”.
Her anatomy studies complete, Hosmer returned to her hometown of Watertown in the summer of 1851. She became acquainted with the English actress, Fanny Kemble (who was at the time living and working in Massachusetts) who emboldened her to pursue a career as an artist. Hosmer took her first steps by setting up a studio in her backyard. Her first works included a medallion featuring the face of her professor Joseph Nash, and a bust of Napoleon gifted to her father. But the most notable early sculpture was of the mythological figure Hesper (1852) which would mark the beginnings of a recurring theme in Hosmer’s works of iconic female figures. This work garnered her first opportunity for public attention and specifically that of author Lydia Maria Child. As Welsh explains, “Mrs. Child soon became one of Harriet’s most powerful allies, using her connections and influence to publicize Harriet’s work by writing a rave review of Hesper [and thereby launching] Harriet as a serious artist”.
Around this time Hosmer befriended the tempestuous American stage actress, Charlotte Cushman. Cushman would have a lasting impact on the artist’s life. While the two may (or may not) have engaged in a romantic relationship, they also bonded over their shared belief in spiritualism, something that would comfort Hosmer throughout her life. Cushman also promoted Hosmer’s work within her influential circle of friends and invited her to stay with her at her home in Rome.
Mature Period
In November 1852, Hosmer set sail for Rome with her father. Still only twenty-two years of age, Hosmer found that her reputation had proceeded her, and she was welcomed into the Rome studio of the successful Neoclassical sculptor John Gibson. (Once her father realized she was settled in Rome, he returned to the US.) Kerr writes, “The friendship that sprang up between [Gibson and Hosmer] was deep and lasting. Hosmer worked diligently, doing engravings, books, casts, and copying Classical masterpieces. Gibson was pleased with her progress, admiring both her industry and her talent. A visit by the great German sculptor, Christian Rauch, drew praise for her artistic merit, a fact Gibson reported in a letter to Hiram Hosmer”. The English sculptor’s popularity attracted influential people to his studio and potential patrons were able to view Hosmer’s work.
Hosmer was soon welcomed into an international network of famous artists and writers, including the artist Frederic Leighton; writers Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Thackeray, Hans Christian Andersen, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry James; and poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (her popular sculpture, The Clasped Hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1853), was dedicated to her new friends). The group would become known collectively as the “Spanish Steps Intellectuals” (after the famous Roman landmark).
Rosmer’s growing reputation served as encouragement for other young female American artists to travel to Rome. The most successful of these was Edmonia Lewis, the first African-American and Native American sculptor to achieve national and international renown, and a woman who shared something of Hosmer’s indominable spirit and self-confidence. Others in this group included Anne Whitney, Mary Lloyd, Vinnie Ream, and Emma Stebbins. Commenting on this influx of talent, Henry James dubbed the women “that strange sisterhood of American lady sculptors who at one time settled upon the seven hills [of Rome] in a white marmorean (resembling marble) flock”.
In her domestic arrangements, meanwhile, Hosmer lived in Cushman’s house along with the novelist Matilda Hays, and the journalist Sara Jane Clark (aka Grace Greenwood). They referred to themselves the “jolly bachelor women” but certain tensions would arise. Cushman and Hays had been in a clandestine “female marriage” when, in 1854, Hosmer “stole” Hays (albeit briefly) away from Cushman.
Despite her exciting new life, Hosmer’s financial situation became precarious when her father withdrew his financial support claiming he was suffering his own cash-flow difficulties. Believing this to be a ruse to force her into returning home, their relationship suffered. However, sales from her sculptures allowed Hosmer to be financially independent and she was able to remain in Rome on her own terms. She produced highly successful works at this time. Her 1854 bust of the mythological figure Medusa, whose hair was replaced by an entanglement of live snakes, was not, in Hosmer’s interpretation, the full monster (gorgon) she is doomed to become. As Welsh state, “[Hosmer’s] portrayal was not the standard image of dread, but one of a beautiful woman, made horrific against her will”. She produced her first life-size sculpture, Oenone (1854-55), in the same year, and her rendering of the figure Puck (1855) (a character from Shakespeare’s, A Midsummer’s Night Dream) sold thirty copies at a $1,000 each. Welsh comments, these sculptures “were considered extraordinary. Her work offered a passion and a depth of expression that was markedly unlike that of her contemporaries”.
Hosmer had started to challenge the assumption that sculpting was physical work only fit for a man (especially through her life-size Oenone sculpture). She also played up to her image as a female non-conformist, and became well-known locally for dressing and behaving “inappropriately”. As Welsh explains, “Harriet took to wearing a man-tailored shirt, a cravat, a skirt or large bloomer-like pants, and a purple smock. She wore her curly hair short, topped by a velvet sculptor’s hat. Creating the impression of a young boy, she was allowed the freedom to ride and walk the streets of Rome unescorted and to eat alone in the cafes near her studio. Her midnight horse rides were the talk of the city, as riding – or even walking – alone in Rome was an uncommon thing for a woman to do”.
Kerr explains how Hosmer’s next work “brought her an unusual honor. She was commissioned in 1857 to do a sculpture for the tomb of Judith Falconnet in S. Andrea delle Fratte Church in Rome. This was the first Italian tomb sculpture ever done by an American, and one of the few before or since to have been created by a woman. Judged an artistic triumph, its completion was a major accomplishment for its diminutive 27-year-old creator”. The commission confirmed her reputation, and in 1858 Hosmer was wealthy enough to rent her own apartment and studio. In her studio she would entertain prestigious visitors including the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII of England) in May of 1859. He was a great admirer of her work and purchased her sculpture, Puck, and later The Sleeping Faun, in 1870.
Hosmer’s growing reputation abroad also saw her make several trips back to the United States to promote her work. In her native country her female subjects, such as Beatrice Cenci (1857) (a Roman noblewoman who was beheaded in 1599 for killing her own father), made her popular with the woman’s suffrage movement. In 1860, she won the commission to create a statue of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton. The resulting work, at fifteen-feet high was an imposing sculpture through which Hosmer further challenged preconceptions of the physical limitations of female sculptors. She had also found time to reconcile with her father who was suffering faltering health. He died in April 1862, with Hosmer the sole heir to his estate.
Hosmer’s personal life was, however, rather less straightforward than the upward trajectory of her career thus far. While she made public statements about her desire to remain unmarried and celibate so as to focus fully on her art, she engaged in several passionate romantic relationships with influential women in her circle. One such relationship was with Lady Marian Alford, an English artist, art patron, and author who was known for her work with the Royal School of Art Needlework.
In 1864, Hosmer become embroiled in a professional scandal. While one of her works, Zenobia in Chains (1859), depicting the ancient queen of Palmyra, was being heralded in an exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London, an anonymously published article alleged that the piece had in fact been sculpted by one of her male assistants. Hosmer and her friends launched a campaign in the press and in the courts through a libel suit to clear her name. Eventually the identity of her accuser was revealed as the American sculptor, Joseph Mozier, who most believed had acted out of jealous spite. Hosmer dropped the libel suit once her name had been cleared, but reflecting on the incident, she rued, “a woman artist, who has been honoured by frequent commissions, is an object of particular odium. I am not particularly popular with any of my brethren”.
Later Period
The later years of Hosmer’s career were a mixture of triumphs and disappointments. She was devastated to have lost the commission for a memorial sculpture for American president, Abraham Lincoln, but threw herself wholeheartedly into what would be her only sculpture to feature a living person, Maria Sophia, Queen of Naples. Hosmer become friends with the exiled Queen (and King) when they were staying in Rome (she would also visit them when they had moved on to Germany).
In 1868, Hosmer commenced her most important female romance with the widow, Lady Louisa Ashburton following their short vacation to Perugia. A renowned art collector and philanthropist, Lady Ashburton purchased several of Hosmer’s works, helped to promote her work, and provided her with financial backing. Although their relationship was too volatile for the two to cohabit permanently, during their 25-year relationship Lady Ashburton (and her daughter) lived for periods with Hosmer in Rome, and Hosmer for a periods with Lady Ashburton in England.
With Neoclassicism falling out of fashion, Hosmer turned her focus more fully onto her interests in scientific inventions, as well as writing about Spiritualism. Her efforts, especially in the scientific field, brought her some acclaim with the first of her inventions being a new type of artificial marble which was promising enough to warrant a patent in both America and Italy. As Culkin explains, Hosmer’s marble “allowed sculpture to move from a slow, painstaking skill into the efficient modern world, where items could be quickly mass-produced”. Hosmer also developed a new wax method of sculpting which she felt allowed for more precision than traditional methods. It involved a process of modelling whereby the body of a statue was cast in plaster before an outer coating of wax was applied, thereby allowing the sculptor to fashion the finest possible details on the figure. She complemented her inventions with writing projects connected to her faith in Spiritualism. These included a play (written in 1875) titled: 1975: A Prophetic Drama.
In her twilight years Hosmer’s devoted most of her time to her pet venture, the creation of a perpetual motion machine. Culkin explains how “Hosmer spent decades on this project, eventually proclaiming, ‘I would rather have my fame rest upon the discovery of perpetual motion than upon my achievement in art'”. Her plans for the contraption (for which she secured a patent) were wholly in keeping with her spiritual beliefs. It featured a tall glass spire (lit from the inside), capped with a sphere – symbolizing the sun. She had attached round riding cars – symbolizing the planets – to long metal arms and these were intended to rotate around the sphere giving passengers what Hosmer described as “the sensation of inhabiting other worlds than our own and of viewing our own planet, Earth, from a new point in space”. Sadly for Hosmer her machine never passed the planning stage.
Hosmer settled in the United States permanently in the early 1890s, living in Chicago, Terre Haute, Indiana, and finally, her hometown of Watertown. Having already become acquainted with suffragist, Phebe Hanaford (in the 1860s) she had made a new friend in Susan B. Anthony, the American social reformer and women’s rights activist who played a pivotal role in America’s suffrage movement. Through that friendship, the Chicago suffragist group, the Queen Isabella Society, commissioned Hosmer to sculpt Isabella of Castille (the 15th century catholic monarch) for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It was to be her last major work. But, as Kerr explains, the sculpture met with a rather inauspicious end: “An internecine squabble in Chicago as to whether Hosmer’s statue should be placed in the Women’s Pavilion, or whether it should take its place in the wider exhibition of American Art, resulted in its location outside the California pavilion – a decision that may have pleased no one. Queen Isabella was exhibited in plaster, and funds for a permanent model never materialized”.
Hosmer’s relationship with Lady Ashburton had by now cooled and advancing age meant she had also suffered the loss of several close friends and allies. Finally, in 1900 she found her way back home to Watertown where, now near penniless, she boarded with the family of a local jeweler (named Gray). While working on an unfinished memoir, in February of 1908, Hosmer contracted a cold which developed into a serious raspatory condition and she died soon after at the age of seventy-seven.
The Legacy of Harriet Hosmer
Hosmer left an indelible mark on the world of nineteenth century sculpture. A leading figure in Neoclassicism in her own right, history now sees her as an icon in the story of female artists. In her own time, it is believed that she was the model for Hilda in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun (1860), while other references to Hosmer, or characters inspired by her, appear in the writings of Louisa May Alcott and Kate Field. Latterly, she has emerged as a torchbearer in the histories of women’s and LGBT groups. As author Barbara Kailean Welsh writes, “defying the limitations and gender expectations of her time, she became American’s most famous woman sculptor of the 19th century, achieving international recognition and breaking down social and professional barriers to allow freedom for women in ways never before experienced”.
Author Kate Culkin adds that some, “contemporary artists find her to be a muse. Two such inspired artists – Patricia Cronin and Jody Culkin – have [produced] work inspired by Harriet. Cronin [has produced a] series of black and white watercolors of [Hosmer’s work, while] Culkin’s work [has taken elements of Hosmer’s] iconography, such as fauns and chains, and incorporate[d] them into multi-media projects and photographs”. Andrea Moore Kerr concludes, “She died a pauper, but the artistic legacy she left was rich and enduring. Statues by Hosmer – each a monument to her courage and persistence – grace the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, the London Academy, and other venues of distinction”.
From Woman: Her Position, Influence and Achievement Throughout the Civilized World. Designed and Arranged by William C. King. Published in 1900 by The King-Richardson Co. Copyright 1903 The King-Richardson Co.:
The woman has honored both her native land and her sex by her brilliant work. She proved that Americans can be sculptors, and that a woman can handle a chisel as well as a palette and brush.
Her birthplace was Watertown, Mass. Her mother and older sister had died of consumption and her father, an eminent physician, encouraged her to spend much time in the open air. Studies were of secondary importance. She soon had a taste for hunting, fishing, rowing, horseback riding, and became an all around athlete. In the fields and forests she began to model dogs, horses, and other animals in a clay pit near her home.
Her physical strength enabled her afterward to wield the four pound mallet for eight or ten hours per day in giving life to form marble.
Her school days in Lenox, Mass., were not marked by scholarship or attention to the routine of school life. Nature was her school and teacher. She was despair of those who were appointed her instructors. Finding that sculpture was her forte she went to St. Louis to study anatomy, as she could not gain admission to conservative medical schools of the East.
Next she went to Rome and became the pupil of the famous sculptor, Gibson. For her work, The Sleeping Fawn, She received $5,000. Zenobia in Chains was one of her masterpieces. The proud but captive queen of Palmyra is shown as she was forced to march in the triumphal procession of the Roman conquerors. “She is a queen in spirit, undethroned [sic] by calamity.”
The bronze statute of Col. Thomas H. Benton in St. Louis is a specimen of her work. In accepting the invitation to prepare the statue, she said, among other things, “But I have also reason to be grateful to you because I am a woman; and knowing what barriers must in the outset oppose all womanly efforts, I am indebted to the chivalry of the West, which has first overleaped [sic] them.”
From Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company:
Harriet Hosmer, an American sculptor, born in Watertown, MA. She early showed marked aptitude for modeling, and studied anatomy with her father, a physician, and afterwards at the St. Louis Medical College. She then studied in Boston until 1852, when, with her friend Charlotte Cushman, she went to Rome, where from 1853 – 1860 she was the pupil of the English sculptor, John Gibson. There she was associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thorwaldsen, Flaxman, Thackerary, George Eliot and George Sand; and she was frequently the guest of the Brownings at Casa Guidi, in Florence.
Among her works are Daphne and Medusa, ideal heads; Puck, a spirited and graceful conception, which was esteemed so successful that thirty copies were ordered by various art collectors; Œnone, her first life-sized figure, now in the St. Louis Museum and her Beatrice Cenci in the library of the same city..
Her most ambitious work is a large statue of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, in Chains, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her bronze figure of Thomas H. Benton is in Lafayette Park, St. Louis, and the Sleeping Faun exhibited in Paris in 1867, is one of her best works. Her heroic statue of Queen Isabella of Castile was unveiled in San Francisco in 1894.
While a “Classist” in taste and training, she invented several technical processes in connection with her art.
Miss Hosmer lived in Rome until a few years before her death, and Hawthorne described her picturesquely in his Italian Notes, and in his Marble Faun.