Edward Virginius Valentine was the youngest of nine children of Mann Satterwhite and Elizabeth (Mosby) Valentine. He was born on November 12, 1838, at Richmond, Virginia, where his father was a prosperous merchant, a member of a family that had been in Virginia since the middle of the seventeenth century.
Valentine received his early education from tutors and in private schools. His wish to become a sculptor led him to the study of anatomy, and in 1856, he began to attend lectures at the Medical College of Virginia, Richmond.
By 1857, he had made several portrait busts, and in the fall of 1859, he went to Paris, where he studied drawing from the nude under Thomas Couture and modeling under Fransois Jouffroy. He then traveled to Italy, visited numerous galleries, and studied in Florence.
In 1861, he was accepted as a pupil in the Berlin studio of August Kiss, where his charm and goodness completely won the old sculptor's heart. In the fall of 1865, he studied for a time at the Royal Academy, Berlin.
While Valentine was in Berlin, he received from the South photographs of Gen. Robert E. Lee and made from them a portrait statuette, which he sold for the benefit of the Southern cause. Toward the end of 1865, he returned to Richmond, where he opened a studio. But in Richmond, in the tragic circumstances of the Reconstruction, he at first received no orders.
Undaunted, he continued to work diligently, producing the heads entitled "The Penitent Thief" and "The Woman of Samaria, " and a number of portrait and genre studies of the American Negro. Among the latter are "Uncle Henry, " a character study of the old-time plantation Negro; "The Nation's Ward, " a happy-go-lucky African; and a mildly satirical statuette, "Knowledge Is Power, " which suggests the "Rogers groups" and shows a black boy sound asleep over his tattered book.
A much-admired bust of General Lee, done from life, was followed by portraits of J. E. B. Stuart, Albert Sidney Johnston, Joseph E. Johnston, Col. John S. Mosby, Commodore Matthew F. Maury, and other Southern leaders, most of them done from life. At last, in 1870, came a really inspiring commission, resulting in Valentine's finest work, the marble recumbent figure of Lee for the Lee Mausoleum at Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia.
Many examples of Valentine's work are to be seen in Richmond at the Jefferson Hotel, which has his marble statue of Thomas Jefferson, in Monroe Park, where his bronze figure of Gen. W. T. Wickham stands, and in the Valentine Museum, former home of his brother Mann. His classical group representing Andromache and Astyanax after their farewell to Hector was shown at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, in 1893. He had won praise in Berlin for a bust from life of Dr. Franz von Holtzendorff, and in London for the Lee statuette. In 1908, Valentine's bronze standing figure of Lee was unveiled in Statuary Hall, Washington, D. C. , as the gift of the State of Virginia.
Valentine was married on November 12, 1872, in Baltimore to Alice Churchill Robinson, but she died on August 23, 1883, and on January 5, 1892, he remarried to Katherine Cole (Friend) Mayo. There were no children.
30 July 1786 - 20 March 1865
1 December 1801 - 22 December 1872
1825 - 3 April 1832
1828 - 1885
22 April 1824 - 22 October 1892
1831 - 1896
15 October 1847 - 5 February 1927
1845 - August 1883
