Portrait of Harriet Hosmer by William Page

Portrait of Harriet Hosmer by William Page

Hosmer, Harriet Goodhue, 1830-1908.; Sculpture, American.; Women sculptors.; Women artists -- Exhibitions.; Page, William -- 1811-1885.;

Harriet Hosmer was born at Watertown, Massachusetts, and completed a course of study in Lenox, Massachusetts. She was a delicate child, and was encouraged by her father, a physician, to pursue a course of physical training by which she became expert in rowing, skating, and riding. Mount Hosmer, near Lansing, Iowa is named after Hosmer, the result a race to the top that she won as a youth. She showed an early aptitude for modeling, and studied anatomy with her father, and afterwards at the St. Louis Medical College. She then studied in Boston and practiced modeling at home until November 1852, when, at age 22, with her father and her friend Charlotte Cushman, she went to Rome, where from 1853 to 1860 she was the pupil of the English sculptor John Gibson. Hosmer shared a house with actress Charlotte Cushman and soon formed close friendships with such prominent expatriates as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and fellow sculptors John Gibson, Emma Stebbins, and William Wetmore Story. References to Hosmer or characters inspired by her appear in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Kate Field among others. This unlikely coalition, along with her talent, ambition, and careful maintenance of her public profile, ultimately brought her great acclaim. Hosmer's critique of women's position in nineteenth-century culture through her sculpture, women's rights advocates' use of high art to promote their cause, the role Hosmer's relationships with women played in her life and success, and the complex position a female artist occupied within a country increasingly interested in proving its gentility made her unique for her time period. She was devoted for 25 years to Lady Ashburton, widow of Bingham Baring, 2nd Baron Ashburton. She also designed and constructed machinery, and devised new processes, especially in connection with sculpture, such as a method of converting the ordinary limestone of Italy into marble, and a process of modeling in which the rough shape of a statue is first made in plaster, on which a coating of wax is laid for working out the finer forms. Harriet Hosmer was celebrated as one of the country's most respected artists, credited with opening the field of sculpture to women and cited as a model of female ability and American refinement. William Page was an American painter and portrait artist. He died in 1885, aged 74 on Staten Island. After painting portraits in Albany for a year, he went to New York, where he executed likenesses of William L. Marcy and John Quincy Adams. Page then went to Italy, where he resided for eleven years in Florence and Rome, coming back to New York in 1860. While he was in Italy, he painted the portraits of Robert and Elizabeth Browning and other well-known Englishmen and Americans. In 1836, he was elected a National Academician, and he was president of the National Academy from 1871 until 1873. About 1844 he moved to Boston, but in 1847 he returned to New York for a stay of two years. Although extravagantly praised as an artist from the 1830s into the 1860s, Page's reputation suffered in later life because he changed his style so frequently and, more particularly, because technical characteristics of his painting method soon caused much of his work to darken excessively.

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