“Dear Home: A Sculptor’s View from Rome, 1867-71—The Unpublished Letters of Anne Whitney”...

The unpublished letters of Anne Whitney (1821–1915), in the Wellesley College

Archives, create a vivid picture of an American sculptor who lived in Rome during

the historic upheaval that brought down the authority of the Papacy and

established the Risorgimento goal of l’Italia una, a unified nation. These literate

and articulate letters deserve to be better known. They give detailed insights into

the artistic climate of the time. Whitney surveys the contemporary scene from a

remarkable part of nineteenth-century Rome – a storied artists’ residence known

as the Tempietto on the Pincio, or the Pincian Hill, near the Villa Medici, home to

the French Academy. While she works assiduously on her Roma and Toussaint

l’Ouverture to launch her public career in Rome, the sculptor’s return to America

brings success in winning the commission for the marble Samuel Adams

(completed 1875–76), for Statuary Hall in the Capitol Building in Washington DC.

When Whitney first arrived in the Eternal City in late spring of 1867, she began

to study the art around her, to call on artists who had preceded her in moving to

Rome from America, and to look for living quarters. The sculptor’s

correspondence reveals far more than the quotidian, however. Whitney’s

epistolary style describes with rich detail the American colony of artists, and her

experience starting a professional career, with emphasis on the study of

antiquity; her residence above Rome in the Tempietto; and her view of

contemporary Rome, its literary side and the tumultuous politics of an

unforgettable time. She conveys above all the sheer excitement of living in Rome.1

The Roman letters were each generally composed over the period of a week,

written on the thinnest of papers and sometimes cross-written to squeeze in last

details, and frequently were as much as fifteen pages long. These she sent to her

family regularly every two weeks.2

Anne Whitney’s sculpture is conspicuously present in Boston and Cambridge,

Massachusetts parks and intersections, whereas she herself is largely absent from

most considerations of nineteenth-century sculpture. Her most prominent public

bronzes are of the Boston Tea Party conspirator and American Revolutionary

patriot, Samuel Adams, near Fanueil Hall; the explorer Leif Eriksson, overlooking

the Charlesgate in the Back Bay; and the seated Charles Sumner memorial statue

on an island amid the bustle of Harvard Square (figs. 1–3). Each of these

commissions was a major triumph for Whitney, which built on the experiences of

her Roman sojourn. Despite their public visibility, only recently has scholarly

‘Dear Home’: a sculptor’s viewfrom Rome, 1867–71: theunpublished letters of AnneWhitney

Nancy J. Scott

19 | Scott: Dear Home: a sculptor’s view from Rome, 1867–71

inquiry begun into her art’s thematic allegiance to

abolitionism, social action and her early feminism

through her association with suffragette causes.

Some significant work has been destroyed or lost: her

Ethiopia and Toussaint l’Ouverture memorial,3

created in plaster in Rome, consonant with the

abolitionist spirit, are regrettable examples. Whitney

unwittingly committed her work to obscurity when

she decided at an early stage not to translate her

plaster work into marble or bronze without a

commission. Her unpublished letters are therefore

invaluable not merely to resurrect a notable feminist,

but also as a vivid account of the expatriate American

artist colony in Rome after 1865, and to articulate the

phenomenon of independent women settling

abroad, willing and able to respond to the new

demand for public monuments.

The commission for the Samuel Adams statue, for

example, was initially a competition for every state

in the United States to provide two sculptors, each to

create a standing figure celebrating that state’s two

most important early political figures. Whitney

would win this honour, doubly prized as she was a

woman, for Massachusetts just after her sojourn in

Rome.4 The marble statue of the Revolutionary

patriot for Statuary Hall, on the US Capitol, would not

be completed until 1875, when on a return trip to Italy

Whitney borrowed studio space from her colleague

Thomas Ball, then living in Florence; a bronze version

was later executed for Boston.

Whitney’s Roman career unfolds among the

women sculptors who began arriving in Rome much

earlier. The best-known of these was Harriet Hosmer,

who arrived in Rome in 1853. Coincidentally, both

sculptors had been born in Watertown,

Massachusetts. Hosmer is fondly recalled by

Elizabeth Barrett Browning in a memorable quote as

‘a great pet of mine and Robert’s . . . who emancipates

the eccentric life of a perfectly “emancipated female”

from the shadow of all blame and doubt by the purity of hers. She lives here all

alone (at twenty-two).’5

Hosmer had reportedly persuaded the British sculptor John Gibson

(1790–1860) to take her on as an apprentice, and exhibited a notable marble

Beatrice Cenci at the Royal Academy in London in 1857. She most famously

embodied the independent women noted in Henry James’s turn of phrase ‘that

strange sisterhood of American “lady sculptors” who at one time settled upon the

20 | Sculpture Journal 17.1 [2008]

1. Anne Whitney, Monument toSamuel Adams, 1880. Bronze, baseof Quincy granite 1875. Signed,dated and inscribed AnneWhitney Sc. / Ames FoundryChicopee, Mass. 1880. FanueilHall, Boston, Massachusetts,dedicated 1880 (original marbleStatuary Hall, US Capitol,Washington DC)(photo: Nancy Scott)

seven hills in a white, marmorean flock’. 6 This

remark, both evocatively poetic and damning,

introduced the tiny, irrepressible Hosmer to the

readers of James’s memorial of his friend, William

Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903). Story himself,

however, gives a more humorous account of

Hosmer: ‘Hatty . . . would have the Romans know that

a Yankee girl can do anything she pleases, walk alone,

ride her horse, alone . . . The police interfered and

countermanded the riding alone on account of the

row it made in the streets, and I believe that is over,

but I cannot affirm.’7 Story further takes the credit for

Gibson’s tutelage: ‘For Dr. Hosmer I did what I could . . .

I got Miss Hosmer a place in Gibson’s studio’.8

The fact that Story’s letters and diaries were

compiled by the novelist Henry James and have

been in print for over a century, whereas the letters

of Anne Whitney remain unpublished, clearly

demonstrates the uneven view of nineteenth-century

sculpture as it has been written until recently. Story,

also a native of Massachusetts, travelled to Rome in

the late 1850s and lived grandly there in the Palazzo

Barberini for the rest of his life. He is best known for

his Cleopatra (1858, Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift

of John Taylor Johnston) and Libyan Sibyl (1862,

Smithsonian Museum of American Art). Story is

today generally regarded as a second-generation

Neoclassicist sculptor, whose static style, if

technically adept, suffers in comparison with

contemporaries of more realist and politicized

persuasion who emerged in the second half of the

nineteenth century, such as Whitney or other

monument makers. Even James, his friend and

biographer, commented, writing after Story’s

death, ‘If sculpture be a thing of supreme intimacy he was not supremely

intimate’.9

Whitney, somewhat reticent about socializing with the grand Story crowd,

confided to her family that she visited his studio while he was absent:

I stepped into Mr. Story’s place the other day. The studios are always open

for people to enter, that is the rooms devoted to the completed work and to

marble cutting, and I much prefer to look around in the absence of the

artist. I prefer the Sybil to the Cleopatra, though both of them are strong

and original conceptions. Saul also I greatly like. Mr. Story’s is the one

studio of Rome that gives one the sense of life of today in art.10

Ready to leave for Germany during her second summer abroad, Whitney, always

decidedly opinionated, remarks:


2. Anne Whitney, Monument toLeif Eriksson, 1877. Bronze.Charlesgate, CommonwealthAvenue, Boston, Massachusetts(photo: Nancy Scott)

What I seek elsewhere is to see what moderns are doing – especially in

Germany. I cannot afford to spend three months in merely laying in a stock

of vigor – As regards Art – Rome of today – one studio, with one or two

exceptions, is much like another. You may infer that this does not speak

very well for the school of the ancients, but . . . It only speaks ill for the art-

instinct of the day.11

Her own project was then not to follow the contemporary crowd. She damns with

faint praise the ‘abundant facility but lack of thought’ in the work of Thorvaldsen-

trained Pietro Tenerani (1789–1869), then reputed to have the best studio in Rome.

She follows with a comparison of the American sculptor, William Rhinehart (1825–

74), who ‘has better things to my mind than Tenerani has – feeling and careful study’.12

On the primacy of the antique, in contrast, Whitney speaks with a voice of

resolute authority, and finds an apparent lack of merit in any art that might neglect it:

The help one gets here is of one kind. It comes from the constant presense

of the antique. An everywhere obtruded science and reiteration of

principles that might almost open blind eyes . . . [those who ignore the

antique . . .] a fool . . . as much so as a physician who should throw aside all

results of previous researches in medicine and set out on an independent

cruise through the human system.13

Still true to the antique at the end of her Roman years, just after French protection of

the Vatican had gone in late 1870, Whitney sought a special pass to study the superb

examples of antique sculpture in the Vatican collections. To that end she spent a

half-day at the Vatican awaiting the permission, where she observed in passing both

Pope Pius IX and the hated Cardinal Antonelli14 whose reputation and effigy she had

skewered on a mask, to unnerving effect, in the sculpture of a poor beggar woman


3a and b. Anne Whitney,Monument to Charles Sumner.Bronze, cast 1902 after originalmodel of 1875. Harvard Square,Cambridge, Massachusetts(photo: Nancy Scott)

just the previous year. Whitney thus absorbed from Rome a new stylistic direction,

antique examples concentrated in a direct, politically inspired message. The Roma,

an image of a mendicant woman, of 1869, drew upon Hellenistic sources, notably

the Drunken Beggarwoman of the Capitoline Museum collections.

Perhaps unwittingly, her words and opinions echo in part those of Henry

James, who expressed great disappointment in contemporary Italian art on his

first trips to Italy just after the Civil War. James is undoubtedly a source for the

prejudice against ottocento work attributed to the American expatriate sculpture

colony, and which has tainted its appraisal to this day. Looking back at his early

travels in Italy, he wrote in 1909: ‘An impression . . . I find even stronger than when

it was first received is that of the contrast between the fecundity of the great

artistic period and the vulgarity of the genius of to-day’.15

The presence of Italian sculptors re-emerging elsewhere in Italy after the

heyday of Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen would have been an issue

almost invisible to the American colony in Rome, and this has contributed to a

general misconception of the larger nineteenth-century Italian sculptural picture.

Rome was in fact no longer the centre of the most important sculpture studios.

The best Italian sculptors of the generation worked in other regions in Italy,

notably Giovanni Duprè (1817–82) in Florence, and Vincenzo Vela (1820–91), who

was Swiss-Italian, in Milan and Turin. This was due to the early liberation of Milan

in 1859 and the concentration of Savoyard commissions in Turin, where the

Risorgimento coalesced during the time of Count Cavour and King Vittorio

Emanuele II. However, the great competition for a national monument, begun just

after the death of the latter in 1878, made it apparent that the fact of unification

had not yet produced an Italian sculptor of national stature.16


Whitney’s identification with issues of feminism, the long-desired

opportunities for women’s enfranchisement in society after the stunning success

of abolition, was strengthened in Rome through an intellectual and artistic coterie

of like-minded women. Emma Stebbins (1815–82), sculptor of the bronze angel of

the Bethesda Fountain (1873) in Central Park, New York, was a close friend in Rome.

She and her companion, the actress Charlotte Cushman, also an earlier champion

of Harriet Hosmer, remained in Rome until 1870.17 Whitney took the trouble to

visit a bronze foundry in Germany to inspect Stebbins’ Bethesda angel ‘ready to be

let down into the pit’ while travelling in the summer of 1868.18 Whitney’s letters

also record many interactions with Edmonia Lewis (c.1844–c.1909), for whom she

registered an increasing respect. Lewis was of Chippewa (Native American people

from the Great Lakes Region of upper New York State) and African-West Indian

ancestry. She settled in Rome, arriving from Boston in 1865. She carved Forever

Free (1867) and the Old Indian Arrowmaker (1866), figural compositions for which

she is best known, and a marble portrait bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

during his visit to Rome from December 1868 to February 1869.19

There were frequent visitors in Rome as well, such as Louisa M. Alcott, the

author of Little Women (1868), and her sister May (Abba May Alcott Nieriker,

1840–79), the latter an artist who ‘studied art first in Boston and then in the 1870s

in London, Rome and Paris, where she settled . . . perhaps best known for her

copies of Turner’s oils and watercolours . . . Ruskin reportedly considered the

finest ever done.’20 May had trained with the English-born doctor turned

anatomist and sculptor, William Rimmer (1816–79), who had been Whitney’s first

teacher in Boston.

As a leading member of this feminist artist group, Whitney’s later fight to have

accepted her monument to Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts senator infamously

beaten almost to death on the floor of the US Senate for his anti-slavery speech in

1856, is a stark reminder of the unfair treatment given to women artists of her

pioneer generation. She won a blind competition for the monument in 1875, only

for the project to be awarded to another sculptor. About this Whitney commented

‘art committees are composed of men from every walk of life but that of art’.21 The

Sumner Memorial Committee awarded the statue instead to her fellow

Massachusetts sculptor and mentor in Florence, Thomas Ball (1819–1911).22 Furious,

Whitney composed a letter to her brother Edward, with hopes that he would be able

to intervene with the committee, especially its chairman, the aptly named Mr Slack:

I groan when I think how it is with us . . . and must be for a long time . . .

A Frenchman would shrug with disgust at the idea that any jury on the

Fine Arts would be influenced by country or sex or any consideration

outside of the work itself. . . . In this matter, I suppose you know, I should be

as glad that Mr. Ball should have a work to do as myself. It doesn’t touch

him or my regard for him. If it had been you or Hosmer or Ream, the

principle would have been the same.23

On the next day, 26 December, she comments to her sister and brother,

undoubtedly attempting to build up her own confidence: ‘bury your grievance,

my dear Sarah and Edward. It will take more than a Boston Committee to quench

me.’24 Whitney lived into her 90s, and not unlike women sculptors even today –


one thinks of Louise Bourgeois – she finally won renown in her later years, and

her design for the Sumner monument was reconfigured and cast in bronze for

Harvard Square in 1902 (fig. 3).

A sharp, and defensive, riposte to a remark by her sister Sarah, hoping that she

would soon return home, provides Whitney’s clearest declaration of the value of

her Roman residence:

What your objection, my dear Sarah, may be to Roman dust which you wish

to see me shake from my feet, I don’t appreciate. It is certain that there is

not another city on this earth which gives so much (to me) for so little. Can

I live in Boston for somewhat over 6 francs a day (the mere living) and have

a studio for $12 a month, with all the help that free galleries can give and

the criticisms of brother artists? I can’t bear a bridge defamed that has put

forward all its arches and planks to bear me up so bravely. To be sure there

is the travel in the summer and the fact that here, or there, my labor has

not arrived to be self-supporting but quite the reverse – Well, I shall keep

on. To have work to do and a place near home to do it is my first desire. Will

Boston give me a quiet corner, I wonder?25

The sculptor lived in the Tempietto from October 1867 to the end of October

1869. This determined woman in a mid-career voyage of discovery, a daring

undertaking at any age – Whitney was 46 years old upon her arrival in Rome – first

had to settle the matter of her living quarters. Her first temporary residence was

immediately reported to her family with a sense of artistic context. Whitney writes:

We have taken rooms in a house strongly

recommended by Miss Foley, on the Pincian,

107, via Felice- Primo Piano . . . Flaxman lived

and worked here in a little studio upstairs. Not

far from this is a house in which Salvatore

Rosa lived, and another the home of Claude

Lorrain.’26

This last reference is to the Tempietto. Built in 1711,

the Tempietto was a triangular extension of the

Palazzo Zuccari, at the top of the Spanish Steps. It was

only a matter of weeks before Whitney found this

dream destination for her living quarters in Rome.

On 6 May 1867 she mentions ‘Here, on the Pincian

Hill in certain places, every door seems to be the

entrance to a studio. I have been into quite a number

of them.’ She goes on to describe to her family the

cluster of American artists living nearby:

[of three studios that have turned up] . . .these

last are near Story’s, Miss Stebbins’ and a lot

more . . . Harriet H’s place is below the hill, an

admirable studio which her landlord built

after her desire . . . E. Lewis’s studio is also

below . . . in the inside wall there is a marble

tablet to the effect Canova occupied it.27


4. Filippo Juvarra, Il Tempietto,built in 1711. Façade view in thePiazza de’ Trinità, from W. Körte,Der Palazzo Zuccari, Leipzig, 1935. (Courtesy of the Fine Arts Library,Harvard College Library)

Whitney obviously possessed familial resources, as she had travelled to Cuba in

1850, was widely read, and had published a book of Poems in 1859, all despite

being deprived of the Harvard education available to her brother Edward. She was

primed for adventure, and coveted an ideal perch in Rome (fig. 4):

We had often noticed a house of quite an antique, beautiful pattern

standing on the brow of the Pincian and looking two ways over Rome, and

longed to look into it. At last, first of June, the sign was hung out. We have

since heard that this house is considered the best in Rome for situation and

attractiveness.

It is called Il Tempieto, little temple . . . four rooms and a kitchen. It is a

charming place, and our kitchen is on the very tip-top of the house.

Address: “No. 15 Trinita deí Monti”.28

Whitney makes it clear that there are two separate rentals, one for the Tempietto

and one for her studio on the corner of the via San Nicola da Tolentino (Whitney

misspells it as the via San Niccolo), ‘the street that leads up from the station’:

The contract for my studio and for our apartments for the coming year are

made and signed . . . [the studio is] a large, warm, airy room with a hard,

smooth brick floor and fine windows . . . I was obliged to take it from 1st

July . . . the actual year is but nine months – rent $130.29

These rooms were of considerable historical interest, and the sculptor was well

aware of the rich history surrounding her. She continues on 24 June in addition to

a letter started the previous day:

I have by chance heard of some historic interest attaching to so many

houses in this street . . . The house to which we

are going in October was the residence of

Claude Lorrain. Close by it is the house which

was the home of Nicholas Poussin for forty

years . . . Salvatore Rosa . . . lived opposite Il

Tempieto. Flaxman made all his illustrations of

Homer in this very house, in a room upstairs. 30

Whitney does not exaggerate the historical

resonance of her extraordinary new place, though

she was conflating popular legends about its having

been the residence of Claude, with Poussin living

nearby. Maria Graham’s biography of 1820 contained,

as frontispiece, a view towards ‘La Maison de Nicolas

Poussin’ which frames Poussin’s house with the

portico of the Tempietto opposite the French church

of the Trinità de Monti, with obelisk in front and

buildings alongside (fig. 5).31 A corollary tale emerged

that the two great painters of the French tradition,

Claude and Poussin, had lived in the same

exceptional residence. Whitney does not swallow the

whole of this coincidence, only that it was ‘Claude’s

Castle’. But the truth is that the two French painters

lived in less high-flown circumstance, near one


5. Frontispiece, ‘House of Poussin,on the Trinità de’ Monti, seenfrom the Portico of Claude’sHouse’. Maria Graham, Memoirsof the Life of Nicholas Poussin,London, 1820. (Courtesy of theFine Arts Library, Harvard CollegeLibrary)

another in the Via Margutta.32 Moreover, as Queen Maria di Casimira of Poland’s

addition of the Tempietto to the Palazzo Zuccari dates from 1711, the memorable

edifice post-dates the lives of both Claude (d. 1682) and Poussin (d. 1665).33

A secondary speculation may be entertained here. Whitney carved a portrait

bust of John Keats (1873; Hampstead Heath parish church) as her admiration for

poetry was so keen, and he had stayed briefly on the Piazza di Spagna just below.

That Claude’s painting The Enchanted Castle (National Gallery, London), beloved in

English culture well before the nineteenth century, inspired the poetry of Keats is

generally accepted.34 Perhaps the association of the Tempietto, and its unusual

architecture and projecting columned porch with balustrade, became united in

the popular cultural imagination with the similar columned architecture of

Claude’s fantastic palace for Cupid. The layers of Keats’ poetry and Roman

residence might thus be at the root of the Tempietto as once Claude’s Castle.

Another reverberation of the Claude and Poussin legend, as perpetuated by

Graham’s biography, may have been that it helped to draw one of the most

famous of artistic travellers of an earlier generation to the Pincio: J. M. W. Turner


6. Albumen photograph ‘Viewfrom the Pincian Hill’, fromNathaniel Hawthorne’s TheMarble Faun (1871 edition). PhotH3188.860m. (Courtesy ofHoughton Library, HarvardUniversity)

was probably a visitor at 12 Piazza Mignanelli on his trip to Rome of 1819, when

Maria Graham lived there, and stayed at the address on his second visit in 1828.

One entrance is accessible still today from the piazza of Trinità de Monti, though

the building has its principal entry lower down on the Rampa Mignanelli.35 Turner

gave evidence of the extraordinary views from the Pincio in his view of the Piazza

del Popolo, with its two churches.36 Whitney evokes the same view to make the

extraordinary familiar to her Massachusetts family:

We have a fine cool wind today . . . in the house . . . the scirocco . . . – the

same wind that blew Hannibal to these shores to the Romans’ cost . . .

Monte Mario . . . crowned with cypresses and the Pincio, on which we live,

rounds out in front of us in a way in which your picture gives no hint of . . .

Then at the foot lies a ravishing bit of Rome looking like a country village,

in the midst of which one of the square towers of Santa Maria del Popolo

rises, or squats rather.37

She further describes the photographs of the Hawthorne ‘tourist’ edition (fig. 6):

‘Visitors in Rome this winter find a good deal of amusement in illustrating

Hawthorne’s Marble Faun with photographs and having the book bound in

Roman bindings’.38

With respect to Turner’s Roman sojourns it may be worth noting, given the

presence of so many sculptors in later decades, that there were sculptors living in

the Piazza Mignanelli. Turner’s landlord on his second visit was Giuseppe Ugo

whose son, the sculptor Scipione Ugo (1808–55), later became a member of the

Accademia di San Luca.39 British artists have been documented as staying at the

Tempietto, among them Sir Joshua Reynolds and the sculptor Joseph Wilton.40


7. Karl Friedrich Schinkel(1781–1841), View over Rome, withthe terrace of the Tempietto, circa1824. from W. Körte, Der PalazzoZuccari, Leipzig, 1935. (Courtesy ofthe Fine Arts Library, HarvardCollege Library)

Before and after came the Germans: J. J. Winckelmann, C. Reinhart and Joseph

Anton Koch, as well as the sculptor Franz Pettrich in 1803, and it is two German

artists, Schinkel and Naecke, who left further records of the extraordinary vista

from the Tempietto (figs. 7–8).41

The collection of sculptors in the Pincio neighbourhood, clearly magnetized by

proximity to the Villa Medici, should be placed in another context, that of an

impoverished city. The marble cutters whom Whitney decries (a Lincoln

monument ‘sublet to a Carrara workman!’)42 were all necessary for the flood of

public commissions, and Italian sculptors needed the work, whether as

technicians or better. The city of Rome suffered at the time from a reduced

population and paucity of civic amenities during its increasing isolation, as the

Pope held out against the unification forces of the Risorgimento. Hippolyte Taine,

who visited from Paris in the late 1860s, bemoaned: ‘This Rome, in the evening

everything dark, without shops, what a funerary spectacle. The Piazza Barberini,

where I am lodging, is a stone tomb!’43 Figures cited by Catherine Brice in her

comprehensive study of the Vittoriano, the monument to national unity, indicate

Rome’s population as about 226,022 inhabitants in 1870, hardly a city of

diversions in the waning days of Papal power.44 Augustus Saint-Gaudens

(1848–1907), the late nineteenth-century American sculptor who had a studio in


8. G. H. Naecke, View from theterrace of the Tempietto, from W. Körte, Der Palazzo Zuccari,Leipzig, 1935. (Courtesy of the FineArts Library, Harvard CollegeLibrary)

the via S. Nicola da Tolentino as did Whitney, from 1870, later recalled: ‘the

same sense came over me that I often felt in Rome, that the reason of its

uninhabitableness was because one might be murdered there at any moment’.45

Yet Taine gives us a bucolic sense of villages amidst a country landscape,

precisely where Whitney was living:

This city which floats above the old walls during so many centuries . . .

center of an inextricable history, of numerous farms and gardens; the

countryside begins just at the heights of the Pincio, from the villa Ludovisi,

to the garden of the Quirinale. Beyond the Via Sistina, or the piazza

Barberini, there are no more houses.46

Starting from the Tempietto, Whitney’s view seemed to encompass every

meteorological as well as political event, an astonishing prospect dimmed by grey

weather, but also by the longer news of the letter ‘the Garibaldini surround the

city’:

We have, besides Rome, an unbroken sweep of sky from zenith to horizon

and then horizon round . . . One can’t help recalling to mind looking over

the city . . . the terrible struggles it passed through when those imperial

devils succeeded each other.

The sky today – what a sight it is from our windows! The ragged

fringes of the clouds over beyond the delicious blue are streaming rain, and

ugly old Rome, grey as time, looks warm and beautiful in such magical

light.47

Whitney’s dream days at the Tempietto ended when she and her companion,

the painter Adeline Manning, took a long summer vacation in Germany and

Switzerland. A fellow artist, the painter Sophia Raincock, wrote to Anne from

England the next year, still conscious of lodgings: ‘Directly I get to Rome I will

enquire about yr apartment at the Tempietto’.48 But there is no further mention of

the vast sweeps of horizon nor the vista towards the Piazza del Popolo. Whitney

instead gives her next address in October 1869 from a much darker apartment, if

still on the Pincio, in the nearby Via S. Felice, no. 105.

Whitney’s sculptural focus during her Rome period was primarily on two

works, Roma and Toussaint L’Ouverture. Of the former only a bronze reduction of

Roma is extant, post-dated 1869, though presented to Wellesley College in 1891.49

The clay and later the finished marble were exhibited by Whitney in her studio

during 1869. What appears to be the last clay model is known through period

photographs in the Wellesley College Archives (fig. 9). Roma is the single work for

which Anne Whitney is most frequently cited today in histories of the period.50

She noted in early 1869, the clay ‘approaches completion . . . The subject is a very

old beggaress.’51 Just two weeks later: ‘My beggar woman is not finished but

sufficiently so to begin to show. It seems to be liked – my best efforts, some say.’52

It was subsequently purchased by Charles How, a family friend, in a statuette-

scale marble (now lost) and sent to the London International in 1871.53 For the

marble version, Whitney had used the services of Carlo Voss, about whom she

remarked in early 1871 that her Roma had made considerable progress in her

absence thanks to his work.54 The Roma model demonstrated the tendency, shared

by other sculptors of Realist persuasion, to look to the late Hellenistic period.


What makes Whitney’s inspiration more pointed is her candour – she first says

the work is a symbol of Rome itself,55 yet it is a despairing image, with only the

memory of grandeur suggested. The hem of the mendicant’s robes is woven with

medallions depicting the Belvedere Torso, the Laocoon and the Herakles.56 She had

initially modelled a portrait mask of Cardinal Antonelli, then perceived as the

unyielding power behind Pope Pius IX, in the hands of the beggar. This bold satire

frightened Whitney herself, and afraid that she had pushed her statement to

excess the sculptor would later revise it, particularly as her custom of exhibiting


9. Anne Whitney, Roma, 1869.Photograph of original clay model.(Courtesy of the Wellesley CollegeArchives)

the work in her studio excited the interest of

travelling American journalists. The New York Times

correspondent reported in January 1870:

Miss Whitney, in her ‘Roma’ has produced a

model in which is embodied the dignity of a

greatness passed forever . . . the face is solemn .

. . from the lean hands is falling the obolus of

charity, . . . At the side half concealed, is held

a mask. It is the face of a priest . . . from which

all feeling of the sweet charities of life is

gone, and upon which suspicion, cunning

superstition, dread and ascetic conceit, have

set their stamp.57

Whitney shipped the plaster off to Florence, whence

it was sent to the United States.58 Later she removed

the portrait resemblance in the ‘priest’s mask’

entirely, so that it would no longer represent Cardinal

Antonelli:

I have been making a vast improvement in the

mask of my beggar . . . no longer the cap upon

the head, you will have no reason to fear for

it or for me . . . the other . . . after much

thinking . . . too literal – by taking it up into

the sphere of symbol it is made more in keeping with the rest – truer in

point of art.59

Whitney criticized her first Antonelli, in the same letter, as ‘reduced to . . . the level

of a comic satirical print’. Roma was a harsh criticism of contemporary realities in

the much-impoverished Eternal City: ‘Rome, that dreadful town’, she began one

letterhead in October 1869. The Città Ecclesiastica was on the brink of becoming

the Città dal Governo, a profound seismic political change that would have

reverberations neither Whitney nor any contemporary could have fully

comprehended at the time.

The Toussaint L’Ouverture is never mentioned in Whitney’s letters, even

though it must have been produced in Rome, as it was finished and exhibited in

Boston by 1873, at the same time she first showed her bust of John Keats.60 Archive

photographs are the only remaining proof of her work on the half-clothed

crouching Haitian independence leader (fig. 10). Payne speculated that Whitney’s

mysterious omission of a new project, including missing letters during this time,

may have been intended to protect her family from the distressing idea that she

was modelling from a half-nude male.61

Whitney’s first career was poetry, and her published poems (entitled Poems,

1859), including one on Tasso, indicative of her interest in Italian epics, and

another on Toussaint L’Ouverture, share the theme of falsely imprisoned heroes.

It is therefore quite fascinating to trace Whitney’s literary preoccupations, as her

poetry clearly prefigures certain of her later sculptural conceits. Moreover, her

letters refer constantly to literature and history, informing her experience of


10. Anne Whitney, Toussaintl’Ouverture, exhibited 1873 (nowlost). Photograph of originalplaster study. (Courtesy ofWellesley College Archives)

weather, landscape and even tourist sites with larger resonance. Just arrived in

Rome, she requested that her family send her edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall

of the Roman Empire – ‘It would refresh my eyes to see the rest of Gibbon . . .’62

Travelling across the Swiss Alps via Mont Cenis towards Turin, she remembers

Emerson’s remark that ‘Traveling is the fool’s paradise’, as her covered sleigh was

assaulted by ‘hurricane and snowstorm’ before the last descent into Italy.63 Upon

reaching the Florentine residence of the welcoming American art collector and

writer James Jackson Jarves, she recounts a day trip with Mrs Jarves to Galileo’s

tower: ‘Milton was round in these parts one day and called on Galileo and, you

know, had something to say about Vallombrosa’, deftly referencing Milton’s lines

on the fall of Satan and his angels into Chaos.64 Whitney as a young poet may well

have read Samuel Rogers, whose long poem Italy described Galileo’s garden,

illustrated by J. M. W. Turner, and the poem further recounts the blind Milton’s

appearance there.65

Upon settling in Rome in 1867, in November Whitney visited the convent

where Tasso had been imprisoned and died, and where an oak tree still served as

the memorial spot for the creation of his epic Gerusalemme Liberata.66 In other

reports, she observed both the terrain of the ancients and the more recent

Romantic poets, who had been her inspiration:

our first visit to the Baths of Caracalla . . . Except the Colosseum, of all the

Roman ruins it strikes us as the most imposing. There have been found . . .

some of the most beautiful works of sculpture now in the Museums of

Naples and the Vatican. A torso lately found was out there under the light

for us to see! But the thing of most interest to me is that fact that Shelley

wrote here his Prometheus Unbound. I could live a day there without food

on that fact.67

On the political front, Whitney’s letters show a keen grasp of the momentous

events surrounding her; she observes from her high vantage point at the

Tempietto the final attempts of Giuseppe Garibaldi to carry the Risorgimento

fight straight on to Rome:

The Garibaldini surround the city. ‘Tis sad and there has been bloodshed, a

fight between them and the papal Zouaves. The Garibaldini also blew up a

building in which there were a number of soldiers quartered, destroyed

several lives. There are not enough troops to defend the place.68

Nonetheless, on a subsequent day Whitney exults ‘I long to see Garibaldi’, and

then the next day: ‘The news is . . . lamentable. The French are landing at Cività

Vecchia . . . The trumpets of the papal soldiers blow a joyous fanfaronade.’69 From

her Roman studio Whitney related in letters home more of the detail of the

fighting between the Garibaldini and the Papal forces, when the French troops

came to the Pope’s aid to fight the insurgency. In October 1867 Whitney’s journey

from Florence to Rome, after a summer retreat in Switzerland, was interrupted by

the Garibaldini skirmishing along the train lines. In a delayed account,

purposefully toned down for the family, she recalled:

near Narni . . . we were arrested [i.e., the train was halted] on our way to

Rome by those same fellows [the Garibaldini] & turned back to Florence. You

were saved much quite unnecessary anxiety by yr. ignorance. You wd. Have


imagined us bayonetted, insulted & generally treated like the man who went

down from Jerusalem to Jericho – The fact is that we are in all cases treated

with the utmost consideration in traveling – & if the Italians were inclined

to misbehave themselves there are English and Americans about.70

Rome’s and Italy’s fortunes were rapidly changing during these brief three years

from 1867 to 1870. The twin pressures Whitney witnessed – the encircling of the

city by the unification forces of the Risorgimento, and the stranglehold of the

clergy on the city’s major venues and buildings – made the change in government

and civic life inexorable. From her one return trip home to Boston during the

Roman sojourn, during the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war that summer, she

wrote to Adeline in Brooklyn, as both followed the political scene:

But once for all I should like to see that unscrupulous villain . . . Nap[oleon]

III on his back and roaring for mercy . . . He is a doomed if he loses another

battle . . . As far as our poor old Pio Nono – I fancy his infallibility begins to

look like a sorry bauble by this time which he would exchange for any good

bit of serviceable steel. O to see the coming sport from Tempietto!71

And return she would for another full year in 1871, one in which the Tiber flooded

and Vittorio Emanuele came marching down the Corso. Whitney, unable to

concentrate on work, joined the flag-waving throng despite her acerbic opinions.

For the completion of the Adams commission she would once again travel to Italy

in 1875–76 when she worked in the Florentine studio of Thomas Ball.

The richly detailed correspondence of Anne Whitney provides a missing link

in understanding long-overlooked developments in mid-century Rome, just prior

to the establishment of a new national capital, and the push onwards to a unified

Italy. Her sculpture, poetic sensibility and educated eye for historical detail enrich

our context of what artists of the period experienced in Rome. Rome, in turn,

sparked Whitney to create public memorials, recalling us even now to the past out

of the texture of our own urban landscape.


My deepest gratitude goes to WilmaSlaight who, as chief archivist, acquiredthe Whitney papers for WellesleyCollege, and who has been a most help-ful guide to all things concerningWhitney. I would also like to thankcognoscenti di Roma and friends, JoanL. Nissman, Mort C. Abromson andCharles McClendon, who generouslyshared their knowledge.

1 Essential for all research on AnneWhitney are the collected papers, let-ters and the unpublished manuscript‘Anne Whitney: Nineteenth CenturySculptor and Liberal’ by ElizabethRogers Payne (d.1972) in the WellesleyCollege Archives, Wellesley, Mass. This2000-page typescript, of which chap-ters 6–11 include lengthy transcrip-tions of Whitney’s letters from Rome1867–71, is the major source on thesculptor’s life. Subsequent citationswill refer to Anne Whitney’s letters toher family, unless otherwise noted, by date, followed by the Payne page

citation. Other recent essays and exhi-bitions including a reappraisal ofWhitney’s sculpture are E. Hirschler, A Studio of her Own: Women Artists in Boston, 1870–1940 (exh. cat.),Boston Museum of Fine Arts, August–December 2001; J. Headley, ‘LeifEriksson: a Boston Brahmin responseto Christopher Columbus’, AmericanArt, 17, 2, 2003; L. B. Reitzes, ‘The polit-ical voice of the artist: AnneWhitney’s Roma and HarrietMartineau’, American Art, 8, 2, 1994,pp. 44–65; M. Debakis, ‘“Ain’t I awoman?”, Anne Whitney, EdmoniaLewis and the iconography of emanci-pation’, in P. Johnston (ed.), SeeingHigh & Low: Representing SocialConflict in American Visual Culture,Berkeley, 2006.

2 Payne, p. 667. Payne laboriouslytranscribed these letters, edited themfor punctuation and abbreviations,and quoted many at length to formher detailed unpublished manuscript.Edits and changes are minimal, as

observed in my close inspection oforiginals against the manuscript.Abbreviations such as ‘wd.’, shld.’, wh.’are changed to ‘would’, ‘should’,‘which’; and ‘xchange’ becomes‘exchange’ to cite a few examples, inthe typescript version of letters.

3 Debakis, as at note 1, pp. 85, 89,illustrates Ethiopia shall Reach out herHand to God (1862–64) (destroyed),photograph in Wellesley CollegeArchives.

4 Payne, pp. 956–67.5 M. E. Thorp, ‘The white, mar-

morean flock’, New England Quarterly,32, 2, 1959, pp. 124–69; J. Mayo Roos,‘Another look at the white, marmore-an flock’, Woman’s Art Journal, 4, 1,1983, pp. 29–34. Roos analyses anddeconstructs the unforgettabledescription with acuity, seeing the‘flock’ as birds. The Browning letter,written from Rome on 10 May 1854, ispublished in F. G. Kenyon (ed.), TheLetters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,New York, 1897, p. 166.

6 H. James, William Wetmore Storyand His Friends: From Letters, Diariesand Recollections, 2 vols, Boston, 1903,I, p. 257.

7 Ibid., I, p. 255.8 Ibid., I, p. 256.9 Ibid., II, p. 84.10 6 May 1867: Payne, p. 655.11 28 June 1868: Payne, p. 721.12 12 May 1867: Payne, p. 655.13 28 June 1868: Payne, p. 721.14 18 December 1870: Payne,

pp. 749–50.15 H. James, Italian Hours (1909),

reprint, Library of America, p. 159.16 See N. J. Scott, Vela ed il

Vittoriano (forthcoming), CasaD’Artisti series, Museo Vela, 2008–09.

17 Emma Stebbins was first inter-ested in sculpture in Rome in 1857.

18 19 July 1868: Payne, p. 727. Seealso E. Milroy, ‘The public career ofEmma Stebbins’, Archives of AmericanArt Journal, 34, 1, 1994, pp. 2–14.

19 See Debakis, as at note 1; T.Anglin Burgard, Edmonia Lewis and


Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Imagesand Identities, Harvard University ArtMuseums, 1995.

20 F. Kelly, ‘Turner and America’, inTurner (exh. cat.), Tate Britain andNational Gallery of Art, WashingtonDC, 2007, p. 239. Cited by Kelly: D. A.Corcoran, ‘Another dimension ofwomen’s education: May Alcott’sguide to studying art abroad’,American Educational History Journal,31, 2, 2004, pp. 144–48.

21 22 December 1875, written from Paris, Place Ste. Sulpice: Payne,p. 1009.

22 Payne, p. 1067. See also E. Tufts,‘An American Victorian dilemma:should a woman be allowed to sculpt a man?’, Art Journal, 51, 1, 1992,pp. 51–56.

23 22 December 1875, Paris: Payne,p. 1068.

24 26 December 1875, Paris: Paynep. 1073.

25 15 February 1871: Payne, p. 866.26 2 May 1867: Payne, pp. 652–53.

Miss Foley was Margaret Foley (c. 1820–77), a Vermont sculptor activein Rome from 1860, known for herportrait reliefs and busts.

27 6 May 1867: Payne, p. 654.28 23 June 1867: Payne, p. 663.

Payne locates the building correctlybetween the Via Sistina (known as ViaFelice in Whitney’s time) and the ViaGregoriana.

29 23–24 June 1867: Payne, p. 664;13 May 1867: Payne, p. 661.

30 Ibid.31 M. Graham, Memoirs of the Life

of Poussin, London, 1820. Today theHotel Hassler stands to the right ofthe church.

32 Jonathan Unglaub, author ofPoussin (Phaidon Press forthcoming),kindly directed me to the disen-tangling of this nineteenth-centurymyth. Claude would move from the

Via Margutta to the Via del Babuinoin 1650.

33 The Tempietto, adjoined to thePalazzo Zuccari, is today theHertziana Library. W. Körte, DerPalazzo Zuccari, Leipzig, 1935.

34 M. Levey, ‘“The EnchantedCastle” by Claude: subject, signifi-cance and interpretation’, BurlingtonMagazine, 130, 1028, 1988, pp. 812–20.

35 I am indebted to JamesHamilton for his willingness to allowme to publish this information inadvance of his catalogue Turner andItaly (National Gallery of Scotland,and Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara,2008). This coincidence inspired myfurther research on Whitney’s map-ping of neighbourhood studios.

36 Tate Britain, Turner BequestCLXXXIX, Rome:Colour Studies, fol. 52.

37 2 July 1868: Payne, pp. 746–47.38 3–4 March 1868: Payne, p. 750.

Whitney specifically mentions copiescreated by Helen Merrill and SamuelLongfellow in this letter. A copy of theview of the Tempietto was sent to herfamily. Various copies of such illus-trated versions of Hawthorne’sMarble Faun exist in the HoughtonLibrary, Harvard University.

39 My thanks again to JamesHamilton for this information.

40 E. Waterhouse, ‘The PalazzoZuccari’, review of W. Körte, DerPalazzo Zuccari, in BurlingtonMagazine, 69, 402, 1936, pp. 132–34.

41 Ibid. Körte, as at note 33, pl. 39by Schinkel, looking over Rome fromthe Tempietto porch (pl. 45A), and aview from the balcony by G. H.Naecke, towards the Quirinal (pl. 45B).

42 October 1868: Payne, pp. 746–47.43 C. Brice, Il Vittoriano:

Monumentalité publique et politiqueà Rome, Paris, 1998, p. 13. HippolyteTaine: ‘Cette Rome . . . au soir toute

noir, sans boutiques . . . quellespectacle mortuaire! La PlaceBarberini, ou je loge, est un catafalquede pierre’; quoted in Brice [mytranslation].

44 Ibid.45 H. Saint-Gaudens (ed.),

Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, New York, 1913, I, p. 112, II, p.169. Nothing so vivid as Whitney’sanecdotes and accounts surviveamong the Saint-Gaudens papers, asmany letters and personal paperswere lost during a studio fire. Nor isthere any evidence that the two sculptors met.

46 Quoted in Brice, as at note 43,pp. 13–14: ‘ville qui flotte dans desmurailles vieilles pourtant deplusieurs siecles..centre historiqueinextricable, de nombreux vergers etjardins; la campagne commencait auxpentes du Pincio, de la villa Ludovisi,des jardins du Quirinal. Au-dela de lavia Sistina ou de la place Barberini, iln’y avait plus de maisons’ [mytranslation].

47 24 October 1867: Payne, p. 688.48 Sophia Raincock to AW, 17

October 1870, from Brosebourne,Herts; Anne Whitney Papers,Wellesley College Archives.

49 Payne, p. 798. ‘Whitney remod-eled it [Roma] to be cast in bronze in1890 as a gift to Wellesley Collegefrom the class of 1886. The base of thestatuette retains intentionally thedate 1869 (changed to Roman numer-als) to emphasize the fact that the figure was the same that had beenmodeled in Rome. . . . Later a big Romawas made for the [ColumbianExposition] World’s Fair in Chicago,1893.’ The former now in the DavisArts Center, Wellesley College.

50 T. L. Stebbins, (ed.), The Lure ofItaly (exh. cat.), Museum of Fine Arts,Boston, 1992.

51 4 April 1869: Payne, p. 769.52 16 April 1869: Payne, p. 772.53 26 March 1871: Payne, pp. 868–

69 and 874, a citation of the ArtJournal which documents the Roma.

54 December 1870: Payne, p. 847.55 4 April 1869: Payne, p. 772.56 Payne, p. 817. Noted before

March 1870 in the New York EveningPost, an undated clipping of whichremained in the Whitney scrapbooksuntil 1972. Dr Annella Brown attempt-ed identification (as have I), and corre-lated them to specific pieces in theBelvedere in the Vatican, but onlythree of them are clear enough forspecific identification; unpublishedms., 1979, Accession files, WellesleyCollege.

57 ‘European Correspondents’, NewYork Times, 3 January 1870.

58 20–22 June 1869: Payne, p. 779.59 16–22 October 1869: Payne,

pp. 795–96. Payne further notes thatwas Whitney’s practice to have twocasts made at the outset.

60 Payne, pp. 807, 954–57.61 Payne, pp. 806–07.62 9 June 1867: Payne, p. 662.63 Paris-Turin, 31 March–7 April

1867: Payne, p. 646.64 31 March–7 April 1867: Payne,

p. 646. 65 Samuel Rogers, Italy: A Poem,

London, 1830. Illustration by J. M. W.Turner, p. 135. John Milton, ParadiseLost, Bk. I, Vol 2: ‘Thick as autumnalleaves that strow the brooks/InVallombrosa.’

66 Payne, pp. 808–09 summarizesthis letter.

67 10 May 1868: Payne, p. 716.68 24 October 1867: Payne, p. 688.69 25–29 October 1867: Payne,

p. 688.70 Author’s transcription: Whitney

letter, 17 November 1867.71 9 August 1870: Payne, p. 832.

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