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Anne Whitney — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Symbolic works of art

In 1860, she established a studio in Watertown. Two years later, she rented a studio in Boston near William Rimmer, an artist and physician, with whom she studied. He critiqued her works as she began making full-length sculptures. She made a life-size sculpture of Lady Godiva and, during the Civil War, a large sculpture entitled Africa. Both were expressions of her political viewpoints. Africa represented an entire race breaking free of slavery and Lady Godiva represented a heroine relieving the poor of exorbitant taxes. They were shown in 1864 and 1865 in Boston and New York. Lady Godiva, which was positively received at its exhibits, resides at the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas. In 1867, she exhibited work in the Boston gallery of De Vries, Ibarra & Co.

Whitney moved to Rome in 1867. While there, she worked in the city and travelled, including two trips to Munich for further study, including learning foundry techniques for working in bronze. In Rome, she was able to make works using nude male models, where it was not considered improper for a woman. Her works from this period include Chaldean Shepherd at Smith College Museum of Art and Lotus Eater at Newark Museum. She associated with a group of female artists in Rome that Henry James described as the "that strange sisterhood of American 'lady sculptors' who at one time settled upon the seven hills in a white, marmorean flock". She was acquainted with American artists that were in Florence and Rome, like Edmonia Lewis, Harriet Hosmer, Florence Freeman, and others within the circle of stage actress Charlotte Cushman, a patron of the arts.

While Whitney was in Italy there was political, social, and economic instability due to the attempts to unify the country, during which the new secular government was at odds with the papacy. She created the bronze sculpture Roma in 1869 to represent the "spiritual destitution" that the citizens experienced due to the political climate, symbolized by the ancient beggar woman. It was shown in Philadelphia, Boston, and London. She departed for the United States in 1870 when Rome was overtaken by Giuseppe Garibaldi's forces, then returned to Rome for one year before moving back to the United States in 1871. She then exhibited her sculpture of Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture in Boston. She established a studio in Boston in 1872.

Monuments

In 1875, she submitted a model sculpture of Charles Sumner for a blind competition conducted by the Boston Art Committee. She knew Sumner, a senator and abolitionist, through her brother Alexander, who was a classmate of Sumner's at Harvard University. Whitney's model competently captured Sumner's frame and features. She depicted him seated in a chair, in part because of ancient Greek artist's practice of portraying prominent people seated to "represent dignity and something of state." She won the contest, including receiving the prize money, until the judges realized that they had selected a work made by a woman; they thought it would be inappropriate for a woman to sculpt a man's legs. The judges rejected her offering and selected Thomas Ball's sculpture for the Boston Public Garden. Both the Sumners and the Whitneys were disappointed, but Whitney wrote in a letter, "Bury your grievance; it will take more than the Boston Art committee to quench me."

She exhibited the model of Sumner at the Centennial Exposition of 1876. Following an 1879 exhibit of the model, the New York Evening Post stated of the judge's decision, "Think of a woman bringing her mind to bear on the legs of a man-even if those legs were inside a pair of stone trousers! New York Evening Telegram wrote a verse which starts out: "You see, ’tis a fixed law of art, my friend, / That only a man can superintend / The play of muscle and post of limb, / Whenever a statue is made of him." The verse later states "Yet under the dome of the Capitol / Stands Samuel Adams erect and tall, /

As free as his namesake before the fall; / And though the image was carved by woman / Rarely is marble so grandly human."

Among her well-known public monuments is the statue of Samuel Adams (1876) in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the US Capitol, Washington, D.C. Whitney traveled to Italy in 1875 to acquire the marble for the sculpture. During the trip, she studied French sculpture techniques at Écouen, realized in her work Le Modèle, which was created with a degree of Realism. A bronze and granite replica (1880) of the Samuel Adams sculpture is installed in Faneuil Hall Plaza in Boston, where Adams gave speeches about British rule and taxation.

Another important work is the statue of Leif Erikson (1887) in Boston. She corresponded with Frederick Law Olmsted about the placement of the monument and its landscaping. Another edition, Leif, the Discoverer, was placed in Juneau Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Portrait sculptures

For about 20 years up to 1896, Whitney focused on portrait sculptures of prominent individuals. Garrison said Whitney's sculpture, William Lloyd Garrison (1879), was the closest likeness made of him. It is at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. She depicted Alice Freeman Palmer, President of Wellesley College; economist Harriet Martineau; and suffragists Frances Willard and Whitney's cousin Lucy Stone, which is in the Boston Public Library. She also depicted Mary Tileston Hemenway, the famed philanthropist and reformer. Her sculpture of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1892) is at the Mark Twain House, and a bust is at the Day House, owned by the adjacent Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Hartford, Connecticut. The Uris Library at Cornell University houses the Jennie McGraw Fiske Medallion.

She completed statues and busts of other famous individuals, such as Edward Charles Pickering and James Walker, presidents of Harvard University. The busts are at the Harvard Art Museums. She also made sculptures John Keats of the poet, and sculptures of Samuel Sewall, Robert Gould Shaw, and Eben Norton Horsford. Other of her works can be found in the collections of the Amherst College, and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.

Although she was still healthy and vibrant, her career began to slow down into the 1890s. She did, though, create a larger version of Roma for the Palace of Fine Arts at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.

For the same exposition she also created Child with Calla Lily Leaves, a fountain in bronze with a winged cherub on a stem above a basin decorated with leaves and vines representative of the emerging Art Nouveau style. This was on display in the center of the Hall of Honor in the Woman's Building at the Exposition. A replica of this fountain was cast at the request of Mariana Porter, and is located in West Newton, MA on the corner of Chestnut and Highland Streets, installed in memory of Anne Whitney's close friend, Catherine Porter Lambert (1817–1900), who also came from a family of abolitionists. Her last major work of art was the creation of the sculpture from the model of Charles Sumner sculpture from 1875. It was completed in 1902 and is installed at Harvard Square.

Legacy

She created prominent monuments for public sites, like the United States Capitol, of historical figures Samuel Adams, Charles Sumner, and Leif Erikson. Even though the works are well-known, her association as creator of the works is not widely recognized. Her works, though, are in a number of museums and collections, including Davis Museum at Wellesley that has seven of her works, Roma, Harriet Martineau, Abby Adeline Manning, Ann Mary Hale, Alice Freeman Palmer, Relief of George H. Palmer, and Eben Norton Horsford. Her portrait of Abby Adeline Manning is also at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.

Whitney also modeled for Cyrus Dallin's 1915 sculpture of Anne Hutchinson that is on the grounds of the Massachusetts State House. This same grouping was later incorporated into Dallin's 1922 Provincetown, Massachusetts sculpture Signing of the Mayflower Compact.

She is also not known for her active role in the expatriate communities in Rome, Florence, and France—where women were able to attain a richer educational experience and access to original works of art that was not afforded to women in the United States at that time. As Louisa May Alcott said in Little Women, when independent women felt the need to "go to Rome, and do fine pictures, and be the best artist in the whole world." Whitney said of Rome, "It is certain that there is not another city on this earth which gives so much (to me) for so little." Whitney's letters during that time provide insight into the importance of her time in Europe towards her artistic development.

The Anne Whitney Archive at Wellesley College holds more than 4000 letters, photographs, and other documentation that includes more than 400 letters she sent to her family about her life abroad. Jacqueline Marie Musacchio's article "Mapping the 'White Marmorean Flock': Anne Whitney Abroad, 1866–1867" uses Whitney's extensive correspondence to create a timeline and associated maps of two trips Whitney made in Europe during this period.