Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography

Introduction: A Woman of Her Time

1 Introduction A Woman of Her Time The American sculptor Harriet Hosmer rode through the gates of Rome on November 12, 1852. She was just twenty-two, and as proof of her talent she carried only a daguerreotype of her bust Hesper, the Evening Star and anatomical illustrations she had drafted while studying at St. Louis Medical College. A mere five years later, the New York Times raved of her statue Beatrice Cenci,“The conception of the statue is masterly . . . it is exceedingly bold and original without being overstrained and striking without being affected.”1 In 1865 thousands of people streamed through a Boston gallery to see her most famous work, Zenobia in Chains, soon after she fended off accusations that Italian stonecutters were responsible for her work. Although her career peaked in the 1850s and 1860s,Hosmer continued to work throughout the rest of the century.She also prided herself on her inventions, including an artificial marble, and she spent years working on a perpetual motion machine. When she died, in 1908, the Boston Globe titled her obituary ,“Most Famous of American Women Sculptors.”2 I first started reading about Harriet Hosmer while working in the archives of the Brooklyn Museum in 1993. Her career fascinated me, but I soon had a pressing question: How did she do it? How did she rise to fame so quickly at such a young age in an era, from my understanding of it at the time, in which so many elements in society would work against her? Many of the profiles I read that described the artist as ahead of her time and her success as astonishing and inexplicable frustrated me. She was treated, as Nell Irvin Painter describes depictions of Sojourner Truth, as “an outsized force of nature,” a miracle inexplicably overcoming all obstacles.3 Introduction 2 In this book I argue that, far from being a miracle, Hosmer’s success came about because an extensive network of supporters labored to help her succeed . These patrons included boosters of American gentility, who hoped to prove the United States equal to Europe in terms of art and refinement, and women’s rights advocates. They portrayed the sculptor’s skill and accomplishments not as a miracle, but as evidence of what Americans and women were capable of with the proper training. It was this unlikely coalition, along with her own talent,desire to succeed,and careful maintenance of her public profile, that ultimately forged a place for the artist. Feminist art historians, including Whitney Chadwick, Deborah Cherry, and Griselda Pollock, have been critical to my thinking on Harriet Hosmer. One of their main arguments—that merely identifying female artists in the past fails to address the reasons why there were relatively few women artists and why art historians rarely classified those artists’ work as important— was a starting point for me.4 Their stress on the wide matrix of influences and pressures that shape both the creation and reception of a piece of art also has significant implications this study. Pollock writes: If we were to take art as our starting-point, it would be a chaotic conception, an unwieldy blanket term for a diversified range of complex social, economic, and ideological practices and factors. Thus we might break it down to production , criticism, patronage, stylistic influences, iconographic sources, exhibitions , trade, training, publishing, sign systems, public, etc. There are many art history books which leave the issue in that fragmented way and put it together as a whole only by compiling chapters which deal with these components separately. But this is to leave the issue at the analytical level of the thin abstractions, i.e. elements abstracted from their concrete interactions. So we retrace the steps attempting to see art as a social practice, as a totality of many relations and determinations, i.e. pressures and limits.5 TheelementsPollockpointstoarevitaltomyreadingof HarrietHosmer’s work,but all focus on the components traditionally used by art historians.In my definition, the social practice of art also encompasses the factors studied by historians,from industrialization to immigration to nationalism to political activism. Enormous transformations swept through the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century,and they led to the development of an American middle class, changed roles for both women and men, and created a burgeoning interest in American art and artists. As women became increasingly identified with home, or the private sphere, some pushed against those boundaries and argued for their rights. Abolitionists fought...