With great fanfare, Vinnie Ream’s life-size sculpture of Abraham Lincoln was unveiled on January 25, 1871, in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda (fig. 84). In attendance were all manner of dignitaries, from ...President Ulysses S. Grant and General William Tecumseh Sherman to senators, congressmen, judges, and the general public. The large crowd assembled in the Rotunda to hear the many speeches and to see the young twenty-four-year-old sculptor, who appeared on the podium with her mother. “Could it be,” a reporter for the Washington Evening Star wrote, “that the fragile youthful figure standing there, pale and anxious, and rendered more child-like
Central to any Roman experience was a visit to the Vatican Museum. Daytime excursions were common, although little sunlight penetrated the eighteenth-century galleries, even the niches of the ...Belvedere Courtyard that housed the famous Apollo Belvedere (fig. 7) and Laocoön. As a result, torchlight viewings of ancient masterpieces became legendary. The soft glow of the flame accentuated the finer qualities of the marble carving while allowing viewers to focus upon one discrete work of art at a time (fig. 8).¹ After one such visit, the poet and reformer Julia Ward Howe explained that the marble sculptures “were rendered so lifelike
The Boston-Rome Nexus MELISSA DABAKIS
A Sisterhood of Sculptors,
05/2020
Book Chapter
Boston’s community of reform-minded professional women created a fertile environment for female accomplishment in the mid–nineteenth century. They developed their voices as political activists and ...served as accomplished mentors and models for a younger generation of ambitious female artists like Harriet (Hatty) Hosmer (fig. 1). It was these women whom the young sculptor sought out, gravitating toward such pioneering figures as the writer and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child and later the successful thespian Charlotte Cushman. Child was an active member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, one of the most influential of the antebellum women’s associations that established the
Introduction MELISSA DABAKIS
A Sisterhood of Sculptors,
05/2020
Book Chapter
On a brilliant sunny day in the historical center of Rome, the fictional heroine Corinne is crowned poet laureate on the steps of the ancient Capitoline. The most famous woman in Rome, Corinne is ...lauded as a poetess, writer, improviser, and intellectual in Madame de Staël’s (Germaine Necker’s) popular novel Corinne, or Italy of 1807. Clad in a white tunic with an exotic turban wound round her head, the great beauty improvises verses while playing the lyre: “Italy, empire of the Sun; Italy, mistress of the world; cradle of literature; I salute you,” her performance begins. While paying homage to
“Italy, for America, functioned as the perfect other,” literary critic Leonardo Buonomo has explained. In the nineteenth century, it was not considered a place of historical and material consequence, ...but a “gigantic picture, or a stage where a performance was continually held for the sake of a foreign audience.”¹ In the timeless Campagna (the open landscape outside the ancient city walls), for example, dotted with Roman aqueducts and other picturesque ruins, American visitors imagined the pleasures and beauties of a distant arcadian past in which antique fauns and quaint contadini (peasants) idly rambled. In the city of Rome, however, these
Postscript MELISSA DABAKIS
A Sisterhood of Sculptors,
05/2020
Book Chapter
As interest in the equal rights struggle waned and the ideology of separate spheres became more pronounced in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, women’s access to the public sphere of ...monument making changed dramatically. In fact, Vinnie Ream’s career offered a stunning parallel to the fate of the women’s rights movement, which fractured after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870. Ream domesticated her public image by transforming herself into a salonnière and hosting weekly receptions on Wednesday evenings from nine to midnight in her Washington home. At times, up to twenty or thirty people crowded into
The artist’s studio was the popular face of female professionalism in Rome, a space in which women artists actively fashioned their identities. With its public character, the studio served as a site ...of both production and display where artists showcased themselves as well as their work. With its attendant mercantile interests, it witnessed commerce and financial negotiations and was a morally perilous zone that held the potential of tarnishing a woman artist’s reputation.¹ Considered curiosities for the public lives they led, Harriet Hosmer and Louisa Lander attracted much attention in Rome. Visitors to the city obtained their addresses and calling
