Harriet Hosmer, American Sculptor, 1830-1908 by Dolly Sherwood (review)

Reviews69 "Observations", wraps it all up in three major sections, with the first section ("What Kind of businessmen?") including sub-sections on "Origin and Social Movement", "The Commercial Amateur," and "Family Ambitions"; the second secton ("What Kind of Public Men?") featuring a discussion of "Voluntary Associations and Businessmen" and an analysis of "Parliamentary Ambitions and Rewards"; and the third (and most difficult) section "Hegemony?") discoursing on the relevance of "Social Spheres" and "Economic Spheres" in the lives of the Victorian bourgeoisie. All of these sections (as well as the valuable essay on "Sources" in the "Introduction" and the entire endnote apparatus) provide a wealth of information impossible to relate within the confines of a review of this study. Gentlemen Capitalists is not an easy book to read, but it is well worth the effort because of the keen insights and concepts which Malchow conveys on a complex subject. The value of this study is also enhanced by some interesting illustrations, informative "Appendixes," a detailed bibliography encompassing the primary and secondary sources utilized, and a very complete Index. J.O. BAYLEN EMERITUS PROFESSOR Georgia State University Dolly Sherwood. Harriet Hosmer, American Sculptor, 1830-1908. xiii +378. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1991. $29.95 US (cloth). Only in the past twenty years has scholarship on nineteenth-century women artists been sufficiently serious and prolific to enable the student to form a personal library on the subject. Dolly Sherwood's biography of America's first internationally-recognized woman sculptor, Harriet Goodhue Hosmer, is a welcome addition to the growing collection, for until this volume the only other book on Hosmer was that edited by her lifelong friend Cornelia Carr eighty years ago. Sherwood's extensive research fleshes out Hosmer's story considerably and allows a more critical reading of Carr's. Sherwood draws heavily upon both the Hosmer Collection of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, and the Hosmer Collection at the Watertown Free Public Library, as well as on an extensive bibliography of primary and 70Victorian Review secondary sources. Despite Hosmer's failure to properly date her letters, Sherwood reconstructs Hosmer's major movements, activities and contacts from her childhood in Watertown and Lenox, Massachusetts to her Roman career and ultimate return to the United States as an esteemed artist of the neoclassical movement. Sherwood's study gives Hosmer's artistic accomplishments the consideration long accorded her American male contemporaries Thomas Crawford, William Story and Hiram Powers. In addition, Sherwood clearly charts Hosmer's pioneering foray into a field dominated by men and aptly conveys the independent habits which served as important models for subsequent women artists. Though Sherwood writes for a general audience, historians of art, American and British culture and gender studies will find material of interest. Hosmer's eccentricities of dress, behavior and language, her deliberate single lifestyle and the famous cast of characters who enter her story camouflage the author's own rather unadorned prose. Thankfully, Hosmer's letters are liberally quoted as are those of her associates. The author provides early evidence for Hosmer's self reliant, ambitious and fun-loving character and traces her steady progress preparing herself for an artistic career in spite of the cultural and educational obstacles faced by women. Prior to completing her first marble in 1 852 — an ideal bust of Hesper from Tennyson's In Memoriam — her sole training consisted of experimentation on her own, five months studying anatomy at Missouri Medical College in 1850-1 and some modelling classes in Boston. On the strength of these minimal credentials, John Gibson, the well-known English sculptor, accepted Hosmer as a student. Why Rome's most respected sculptor would consent to provide space for a young American female aspiring artist is just one of many intriguing but unanswered questions raised by the book. Sherwood devotes the remaining twenty-one chapters to Hosmer's most productive period, the Italian years from 1852 until 1870, and summarizes the last thirty-eight years of her life in an epilogue. Sherwood introduces Hosmer's principal marbles into the story at the appropriate chronological points, but the explanations for Hosmer's attraction to...