Augusta Stylianou Gallery

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Sculptures

Beatrice Cenci

Sleeping Faun

Harriet Goodhue Hosmer (October 9, 1830 - February 21, 1908), American sculptor.

Biography

Harriet Hosmer was born at Watertown, Massachusetts.

She showed an early aptitude for modeling, 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.

Engraving of Harriet Hosmer depicting her at age 43 or before.

While living in Rome, she was associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thorvaldsen, 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.

Novelist Henry James unflatteringly referred to the group of women artists in Rome of which she was a part as "The White Marmorean Flock," borrowing a term from Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Marble Faun. These artists included lesbians Anne Whitney, Emma Stebbins, Edmonia Lewis and non-lesbians Louisa Lander, Margaret Foley, Florence Freeman, and Vinnie Ream.[1]

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

Selected works
H. G. Hosmer: Beatrice Cenci

* 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 St. Louis Mercantile Library
* Zenobia in Chains (1859), owned by the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California[2]
* A Sleeping Faun (1867) is now being displayed at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Another version is in Iveagh House, Dublin, see Homan Potterton, 'An American Sculpture at the Dublin Exhibition of 1865: Hariet Hosmer's Sleeping Faun', The Arts in Ireland Autumn 1973.
* 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
* An alternate Emancipation Memorial -- 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,

"The Mermaid's Cradle", Bronze, Fountain Square, Larchmont, NY

A book of poetry, "Waking Stone: Inventions on the Life Of Harriet Hosmer," by Carole Simmons Oles, was published in 2006.

References

1. ^ Williams, Carla (2002). "Whitney, Anne". glbtq.com. http://www.glbtq.com/arts/whitney_a.html. Retrieved 2007-11-30
2. ^ Williams, Janette (March 6, 2008). "Gift helps Huntington acquire American art". Pasadena Star-News.

* This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (Eleventh ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/ ", Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

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