Anne Whitney (1821 – 1915) was an American sculptor and poet. She was born in Watertown, Massachusetts on September 2, 1821 and died in Boston, Massachusetts on January 23, 1915.
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As with so many of the early, successful 19th Century women sculptors Whitney came from a liberal, in her case, Unitarian, supportive family background. Whitney was homeschooled as a youngster, and later traveled to Europe where she studied in Rome, Munich, and Paris before she returned to the United States. In 1846 she opened a small school in Salem, Massachusetts.
In the 1860s she exhibited work in the Boston gallery of De Vries, Ibarra & Co.[1] A well known supporter of both the abolitionist and suffragette movements, Whitney herself was to publicly feel the brunt of the sexism of the day when, in 1875, the commission for a statue of Charles Sumner that won a competition was denied her when it was discovered that the winning model was created by a woman.
Among her well known public monuments is the statue of Samuel Adams (1876) located in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the United States Capitol, Washington D.C., the statue Leif the Discoverer (1887) in Boston, Massachusetts , with another edition that same year placed in Juneau Park, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Whitney was an accomplished portraitist, completing statues and busts of such well know individuals as John Keats, Samuel Adams, Toussaint l'Ouverture, William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, Frances Willard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Samuel Sewall, Alice Freeman Palmer, Robert Gould Shaw, Eben Norton Horsford, Harriet Martineau, Jennie McGraw Fiske, Lucy Stone and others.
Other of her works can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, Amherst College, Cornell University, Harvard University, Smith College, Wellesley College, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, Newark, Museum, Mark Twain Memorial, Boston Public Library,