Background
Harriet Hosmer was born on October 9, 1830 at Watertown, Massachusetts. She was the second child of Hiram and Sarah (Grant) Hosmer and a descendant of James Hosmer, an early emigrant from Hawk-hurst, Kent, England. When Harriet was four, her mother died of tuberculosis. Her father, a physician, having lost three children, gave his one remaining child an outdoor life.
She had a horse, dog, gun, boat, and liberty; she rowed, raced, climbed, and hunted; she studied birds and stuffed them, and made images in clay. She grew up hardy and likable, but she was often a pest to the neighbors and a terror to her teachers.
Education
In her sixteenth year she was sent to Lenox to be taught by Mrs. Sedgwick, whose methods proved successful. Lenox was a cultural center, where notable persons met; Fanny Kemble was a resident, Emerson a visitor. The little Watertown tomboy became a favorite. After three years at Lenox she studied drawing and modeling in Boston, then, in order to study anatomy in a school to which women were admitted, she attended the medical department of St. Louis University. In St. Louis she lived in the home of a Lenox schoolmate, whose father, Wayland Crow, became interested in her art and gave her her first commission for a life-size marble statue.
Career
Finishing her studies, she took a steamboat trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans and up again as far as the Falls of St. Anthony. She smoked a peace-pipe with the Indians and on a wager climbed a bluff since known as Mt. Hosmer. Once more in her Watertown home, she modeled an ideal bust, "Hesper, " and practised marble-cutting. She formed a lasting friendship with Charlotte Cushman, later her companion in Rome. In 1852 she went to Rome, and for seven years she studied under the English sculptor John Gibson, with the advantage, shrewdly noted by Hawthorne, of showing her works in one of the Gibson studios.
Her first productions were a pair of ideal busts, "Daphne" and "Medusa"; her first life-size marble statue the "14none, " placed in the St. Louis Museum. Fanny Kemble's prophecy to Crow that "Hatty's peculiarities will stand in the way of her success with people of society and the world" proved untrue. The "peculiarities" were an asset. Gibson's only pupil, she won favor as a piquant personage, a true artist, yet a good sport, too, not afraid to gallop alone at twilight across the Campagna! Small, quick, and frank, the Yankee girl had character as well as charm. "A great pet of mine and of Robert's, " wrote Elizabeth Browning (F. G. Kenyon, Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1898, II, 166).
In 1854 Miss Hosmer received through Crow the order for her second marble statue, the "Beatrice Cenci" for the St. Louis Mercantile Library. The work proved to be one of her best. The figure is shown lying asleep, one hand under her head, the other holding a rosary. In spite of details too emphatically carved, the work has merit. "The conception, and in the main the execution, could hardly have been surpassed in the Roman colony of the fifties" (Taft, post, p. 205). In contrast with this tragic figure were her next works, "Puck" and "Will-o'-the-Wisp. " The former was a bat-winged elf astride a mushroom, a beetle in one hand, a lizard in the other, and mycologic specimens all about. The Prince of Wales, afterward Edward VII, bought a copy and so increased its popularity that thirty replicas were made, it is said, at a thousand dollars each.
After a brief visit to America in 1857, Miss Hosmer devoted herself to a recumbent memorial figure of the daughter of Madame Falconet, an English Catholic resident in Rome. The monument was placed in the church of S. Andrea delle Fratte in 1858. Meanwhile her best-known production, the marble statue of Zenobia, captive queen of Palmyra, was well advanced. It was shown at the London exhibition of 1862, where it was favorably placed in the fourth niche of a little temple in the center of a gallery, the other three niches being given to tinted statues by Gibson. Hawthorne, seeing the unfinished model in clay, found it full of beauty and life – "a high, heroic ode. " Taft, at a later day, found the finished marble copy disappointing, with "not one grateful touch, not one suggestion of half-tone and tenderness of chiselling – nothing but ridges and grooves" (Taft, post, p. 208). Called home in 1860 by the illness of her father, she received from the state of Missouri an order for a colossal bronze statue of Thomas H. Benton, a work placed eight years later in Lafayette Park, St. Louis. From a distance, the statue has "the dignity of great bulk, " but it lacks vitality; the sculptor, a confirmed pseudo-classicist, swathed her subject in a pseudo-toga.
Her monumental creations were not always successful: her invited competitive design for the national Lincoln monument at Springfield, Ill. , was rejected in favor of Larkin Mead's (1867), and more then twenty years later her ambitious project for the "Crerar" Lincoln at Chicago was declined. She was happier in such inventions as her "Siren Fountain" for Lady Marian Alford (1861), her chimney-piece, "Death of the Dryads, " for Lady Ashburton's drawing-room at Melchet Court, and her marble reclining figures, the "Sleeping Faun" and the "Waking Faun. " In the Dublin exhibition of 1865, the "Sleeping Faun" so pleased Sir Benjamin Guinness that he offered a thousand guineas for it. Learning that it was not for sale, as the artist wished to show it in the United States, he doubled his offer; whereupon Miss Hosmer, original as ever, sold it to him at his first price.
Her artistic pursuits ranged from close supervision of marble carving in Rome to the study of a drowned girl in the Paris Morgue. Her summer vacations, combining business with pleasure, were spent in the British Isles, where she passed from castle to castle; from Ashby to Raby, from Ashridge to Melchet Court. In 1869 she began her full-length statue of the former Queen of Naples, costumed as she was at the battle of Gaeta, a two-years' work pursued with romantic fervor, and resulting in a friendship with the Queen and with her sister, the Empress of Austria. In the latter part of her life she gave herself largely to the problem of perpetual motion, at first in England and later in America. She went West, too, and there spoke on art to enthusiastic audiences.
Personality
She had a genius for friendship and an unquenchable zest for enhancing life through many kinds of intellectual and physical effort.
Quotes from others about the person
John Gibson said that she had "a passionate vocation for sculpture. "
