Harriet Hosmer

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Harriet Goodhue Hosmer (October 9, 1830 - February 21, 1908), American sculptor, was born at Watertown, Massachusetts.

She early showed marked aptitude for modelling, 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 to 1860 she was the pupil of the English sculptor John Gibson.

While living in Rome, she was associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thorvaldsen, Flaxman, Thackeray, George Eliot and George Sand; and she was frequently the guest of the Brownings at Casa Guidi, in Florence. Later she also resided in Chicago and Terre Haute, Indiana.

[edit] Selected works

• Daphne and Medusa, ideal heads (1853)
• Puck (1855), a spirited and graceful conception which she copied for the prince of Wales, the duke of Hamilton and others
• Oenone (1855), her first life-sized figure, now in the Saint Louis Art Museum
• Beatrice Cenci (1857), for the Mercantile Library of St Louis
• Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, in Chains (1859), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City;
• A Sleeping Faun (1867)
• A Waking Faun; a bronze statue of Thomas H. Benton (1868) for Lafayette Park, St Louis
• Bronze gates for the Earl of Brownlow's art gallery at Ashridge Hall
• A siren fountain for Lady Marian Alford
• A monument to Abraham Lincoln -- designed but not constructed
• Statues of the queen of Naples as the heroine of Gaeta, and of Queen Isabella of Spain for the Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893,

Hosmer died at Watertown, Massachusetts, on the February 21, 1908.

[edit] Reference

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.