Background
Anne Whitney, the youngest of the seven children of Nathaniel Ruggles and Sally (Stone) Whitney, was born on September 2, 1821 in Watertown, Massachussets, the town in which John Whitney, her earliest American ancestor, was a leading citizen from 1635 to 1673. She inherited from her parents good looks, perfect health, and liberal ideas. Her father, clerk of the Middlesex Courts, lived ninety-one years, her mother a hundred and one, and she herself ninety-three.
Education
Except the 1834–1835 school year that she attended at a private school run by Mrs. Samuel Little in Bucksport, Maine, she received her education from private tutors.
Career
Reared with every advantage of the time and place, she soon showed a creative mind, eager to express beauty. Yet, though she was nine years older than Harriet Goodhue Hosmer, her fellow townswoman, she was unknown as a sculptor until long after Harriet Hosmer achieved fame. In 1859, the year when Hawthorne was singing praises of the Hosmer sculptures, her Poems were published in New York and won a modest success; a long and highly favorable notice appeared in the North American Review, April 1860. Anne Whitney was in her middle thirties when she began modelling. She had no teacher, but she later attended the anatomy lectures of Dr. William Rimmer. In 1860 she opened a studio in Watertown. Her first attempts were portrait busts of relatives and friends; later she turned to ideal figures. Her life-size marble statue of Lady Godiva, exhibited in Boston, was placed in a private collection. Her "Africa, " a colossal reclining figure shown in Boston and New York, her "Toussaint L'Ouverture" - both an outgrowth of her feeling against slavery - and her "Lotus Eater, " representing young manhood in a relaxed attitude, had a significance more ethical than artistic. Then came four or five studious years abroad, mainly in Rome, Paris, and Munich. After her return, she established in 1872 a handsome studio on Mount Vernon Street, Boston, and there her important later work was done. She was well past the middle of her long life before her sculpture saw "the light of the public square. " It is said that her native state, in awarding her the commission for a heroic marble statue of Samuel Adams, to be placed in Statuary Hall in the Capitol in Washington, stipulated that the carving should be done in Italy, thus necessitating a second stay abroad. The figure stands in a sturdy attitude, arms folded. Of it Lorado Taft wrote: "Although no woman sculptor has succeeded as yet in making a male figure look convincingly like a man, this statue has a certain feminine power, and is among the interesting works of the collection". In 1880 a bronze replica was erected in Boston. Among her other works were the seated figure of Charles Sumner in Harvard Square, Cambridge, her "Leif Ericsson, " on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, and the seated marble statue of Harriet Martineau at Wellesley College, which was destroyed by fire in 1914. Her many portrait busts include those of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Willard, Lucy Stone, George Herbert Palmer and his wife, President James Walker of Harvard, and President William Augustus Stearns of Amherst. Her "Keats, " at Hampstead, England, was modelled from the well-known mask by Hayden. Other works were a statue called "Roma, " representing the city as having fallen on evil days, and an unfinished study of Shakespeare in the Midsummer Night's Dream mood. She died in Boston.
Personality
Though a reformer and an advanced thinker, Anne Whitney was without self-assertion. A memorable personage in the cultivated circles of Boston, she kept her unaffected dignity and charm until her death.