CHAPTER XIX
Sculpture by Harriet Hosmer; Elizabeth Ney; Twentieth Century Progress; Evelyn B. Longman; Absetenia St. Leger Eberle; Malvina Hoffman; Nellie Vern Walker; Anna Vaughn Hyatt; Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Etc.
"It is the Creative Element that endures in all worthy human accomplishment, and that makes any lasting impression upon hu..an life."—James Beebe.
If any woman had longings to express her thought or ideal in clay or marble before the incoming of the nineteenth century, it was not recorded or chiseled for us of the twentieth century.
Harriet Hosmer was the first American woman whose art inclinations led to a sculptor's life. Her experience in developing was full of difficulties. Her mother died of consumption when her daughter was but a little child. Her father was a physician in Watertown, Massachusetts, where Harriet was born in 1830. Being a delicate child, her father encouraged her in every out-of-door sport. She lived in the sun, and the stunts any boy could do she loved to do: riding, swimming, boating, shooting, climbing trees, filling her room with nests of bird or bee, butterflies or snakeskins, till it was transformed into a museum of natural history. At the back of her father's garden was a bed of clay where she showed her early art instinct by modeling figures from that clay.
A preparation for her future work was the study of anatomy with her father, and afterward at the medical college in St. Louis.
Harriet Hosmer wanted to be a physician, but every medical school was barred to her; they could not and would not admit a woman. She applied in Boston and elsewhere for instruction in art, but without success. So back to St. Louis she went for anatomical drawing, which led on to modeling, and so by degrees she became a sculptor. Returning home she modeled her first figure, "Hesper," which being such a decided success, she went to Rome with her father and her dear friend, Charlotte Cushman. There she became a pupil of Mr. Gibson. In his studio she modeled "Daphne" and a number of heads. Her most ambitious work was a colossal statue of "Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra," of which only the head remains. Her "Reclining Beatrice"
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