Born: 1725, United States
Died: 23 March 1786
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is republished from New Jersey Women’s History, in line with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Patience Lovell Wright (1725-1786) was born in Bordentown, into a well-to-do Quaker farming family. As a child she showed great promise as an artist. However, it was not until she was left a widow with five children to support that she returned to making sculpture as a source of income. Initially, she practiced creating pieces using bread dough. When she felt she was proficient enough, she moved to the medium for which she became famous, modeling in wax. She transformed waxworking into fine art with the help of her equally artistic sister Rachel Lovell Wells. Her reputation derived from her skillful portraits of public figures. Wright moved to England in 1772 and with introductions from Benjamin Franklin, she received commissions for portraits of well-known living people of her time, among them William Pitt. She made wax models of them and created the first traveling exhibition of waxworks.
Outgoing and voluble, Wright was embraced by British society and the king and queen, whom she addressed as “George” and “Charlotte.” With the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Wright is believed to have sent secret messages to the Americans. According to one story, she supposedly concealed messages in the wax sculptures that she sent to her sister who was running a wax museum in Philadelphia.
A contemporary of Wright’s commented on the “vigor and originality of her conversation.”
The sisters formed a waxwork show which they took on tour. Wright specialized in realistic life-size wax sculptures of living subjects.
Wright also made history after she submitted the first of three unsuccessful petitions to the New Jersey Legislature requesting repayment of money she lent the government for its war efforts. It is unknown whether she was successful in this final endeavor.
The following is excerpted from “400 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Time” by Minna Moscherosch Schmidt, published in 1933.
A Quaker housewife and mother, left a widow at the age of forty-four, was the first native-born American to follow the art of sculpture. To amuse her children, she made faces out of bread and putty, and when her husband died, turned a natural and untutored talent to material account. She discovered in coloured wax a plastic medium that gave pleasing results and used it throughout her career for making likenesses in low relief and in the round. An English gentleman recommended that she go to England to find better paying patrons, and it was through him that in 1772 she arrived there with letters of presentation. Her keen initiative, magnetic personality, her marked ability and decided genius for producing striking likenesses, facilitated her success. Horace Walpole recorded her arrival in London saying that she had been “reserved by the hand of nature to produce a new style of picturing . . . peculiar to herself and the honour of America, for her compositions . . . live with such a perfect animation that we behold art as perfect as nature.” Lord Chatham admired her work and of him there exists today in Islip Chapel in Westminster Abbey, a bust modeled by Mrs. Wright. She was friendly with King George III and Queen Charlotte and modeled their busts. At the outbreak of the war with the colonies, Mrs. Wright’s sympathies pronounced her a rebel in England and she moved her studio to Paris. Here she modeled the bust of Benjamin Franklin and other famous people, many of the royal and noble houses of France. After the war she returned to England, where her eldest daughter, Phoebe, had married John Hoppner, an artist who later became one of the group with Reynolds, Gainsborough and Romney. Her son, Joseph, had returned to the United States, had painted portraits of George Washington and Martha Washington from which Mrs. Wright modeled busts, and was appointed draughtsman of the Philadelphia mint and created the designs on the first United States coins. General Washington wrote to her hoping that she would reside in the United States, “where you will meet a welcome reception from your numerous friends, among whom I should be proud to see a person so universally celebrated, and on whom nature has bestowed such rare uncommon gifts.” This letter, dated January 30, 1785, is preserved in the British Museum. Unfortunately her death struck down the “Promethean Modeler” before she could return to the land that cradeled her genius. She died in London just sixteen years after she had arrived to begin her career.”