Biography
Harriet Hosmer was born at Watertown, Massachusetts, and completed a course of study in Lenox, Massachusetts. She was a delicate child, and was encouraged by her father, a physician, to pursue a course of physical training by which she became expert in rowing, skating, and riding. She traveled alone in the wilderness of the western United States, and visited the Dakota Indians.
She showed an early aptitude for modeling, and studied anatomy with her father, and afterwards at the St. Louis Medical College. She then studied in Boston and practiced modeling at home until November 1852, when, with her father and her friend Charlotte Cushman, she went to Rome, where from 1853 to 1860 she was the pupil of the English sculptor John Gibson.
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.
She was devoted for 25 years to Lady Ashburton, widow of Bingham Baring, 2nd Baron Ashburton (died 1864). Lady Ashburton was born Louisa Caroline Stewart-Mackenzie, youngest daughter of James Alexander Stewart-Mackenzie, and had one daughter, the Hon. Mary Florence ("Maisie"), born 1860 in London.
She also designed and constructed machinery, and devised new processes, especially in connection with sculpture, such as a method of converting the ordinary limestone of Italy into marble, and a process of modeling in which the rough shape of a statue is first made in plaster, on which a coating of wax is laid for working out the finer forms.
Hosmer died at Watertown, Massachusetts, on February 21, 1908.
Mount Hosmer, near Lansing, Iowa is named after Hosmer, the result a race to the top that she won as a youth.
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