Guest post by Maria Ausherman, teacher, author and independent scholar
Happy birthday to three American women sculptors who were born in September: Emma Stebbins (1815–1882), Anne Whitney (1821–1915), and Vinnie Ream (1847–1914)!
Emma Stebbins
Emma Stebbins, born on September 1, 1818, is best known as the sculptor of Angel of the Waters, the centerpiece of the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. The eight-foot-tall angel stands with wings outstretched and one foot on the upper basin. In one hand, she holds a lily, while she extends the other hand in a gesture of benediction. Cherubs around the base represent Health, Temperance, Purity, and Peace.
Angel of the Waters refers to the biblical story of the angel who imbues the waters of Bethesda with healing powers. Installed in 1873, the statue pays tribute to the Croton Aqueduct, a water distribution system that brought fresh water to the city beginning in 1842. The lily held by the angel symbolizes the purity of the water. The four cherubs around the base represent the virtues associated with clean water and public health.
Emma Stebbins is the first woman to be awarded a public art commission in New York City. Born in New York, she grew up in a wealthy household with parents who encouraged her artistic abilities. The father of the Stebbins’s family was president of the North River Bank. Henry, one of Emma Stebbins’s brothers, became the head of the New York Stock Exchange. A member of the Central Park Board of Commissioners as well, Henry helped to secure the commission for his sister. Additionally, the family helped pay for the bronze casting of the sculpture in Munich.
Besides two public bronze sculptures, Emma Stebbins created a total of about two dozen small marble statues. She died in New York at the age of sixty-seven, most likely from lung disease caused by years of inhaling marble dust, and is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
Anne Whitney (1821–1915)
Anne Whitney, born on September 2, 1821, came from a wealthy, liberal, and supportive family that traced its roots to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Because she was a woman, Anne Whitney could not enroll at Yale or Harvard. Instead, she was tutored at home. Then she studied in Rome, Munich, and Paris before returning to the United States. Associated with the New England literary scene, she studied with sculptor, William Rimmer, the country’s best anatomy instructor. Soon she began creating life-size statues and portrait busts to address abolitionist and feminist concerns.
The Boston Art Committee sought to memorialize American lawyer and politician, Charles Sumner, because he fought hard and risked his life to provide equal civil and voting rights for freedmen. After the committee requested submissions from local artists, Whitney anonymously entered her design. The committee awarded her the commission, and she created the sculpture of Charles Sumner. When the Awards Committee discovered the artist was a woman, the members rescinded Whitney’s commission and her sculpture languished for almost three decades. It now stands outside Harvard Law School.
Although she encountered unfairness in her own life, one success led to another. Anne Whitney created sculptures over the next three decades, inspired by what she viewed as social injustices. Her works included suffragists like Lucy Stone, Frances Willard, and Harriet Martineau, as well as abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Lloyd Garrison. Her works are now in major museums throughout the United States and in parks such as the Boston Common and the National Statuary Hall Collection in the United States Capitol building. She died of cancer in Boston at the age of 93.
Vinnie Ream (1847–1914)
Vinnie Ream was born on September 25, 1847 in a log cabin near Madison, Wisconsin. She was raised on the Midwestern frontier on the edge of territory belonging to Native Americans. Prompted by the beginning of the Civil War, her family settled in Washington, D.C. At the age of 17, Vinnie Ream became an apprentice in sculptor Clark Mills’s studio. She soon became the first woman, and the youngest artist, to get a commission from the United States Congress for a statue.
The child prodigy with remarkable talent got to know Emma Stebbins and Anne Whitney while working in Rome. Her best known work is her sculpture of Abraham Lincoln in the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Standing and gazing downward contemplatively, Lincoln hands the Emancipation Proclamation directly to the viewer thus emphasizing that it is a living document relevant today.
In addition to the Lincoln sculpture, the first federal government art commission awarded to a woman, Vinnie Ream completed at least four major works and several commissioned portrait busts and medallions. She died of uremic poisoning in 1914 at the age of 67. A replica of her sculpture, Sappho marks her gravesite in Arlington Cemetery. Forty years later, two bronze statues by Ream were placed in the U.S. Capitol.
Maria Ausherman is an author, teacher, and independent scholar interested in the intersection of fine arts and documentation. Her book Masters of Shape: The Lives and Art of American Women Sculptors chronicles the lives of 17 pioneering women sculptors who overcame obstacles of gender and race. She is also the author of Absolutely Amazing American Artists: Fidelia Bridges; Behind the Camera: American Women Photographers Who Shaped How We See the World; and The Photographic Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnston. Maria is co-author of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Hawai’i.
More Art Herstory blog posts you might enjoy:
Sculpture or Suffrage: Alice Morgan Wright, by Jennifer Dasal
Reflections on the Audacious Art Activist and Trailblazer Augusta Savage, by Sandy Rattler
A Quiet Eye—The Unique Achievement of Sylvia Shaw Judson, by Rowena Loverance
Portraying May Alcott Nieriker, by Julia Dabbs
Celebrating Eliza Pratt Greatorex, an Irish-American Artist, by Katherine Manthorne
Women Artists from Savannah at the Telfair Academy Museum, by Julie Allen
Visual Feasts: The Art of Sarah Mapps Douglass, by Erika Piola
Illuminating Sarah Cole, by Kristen Marchetti
Defining Moments: Mary Cassatt and Helen McNicoll in 1913, by Julie Nash
Laura Seymour Hasbrouck, A Painter of the Hudson River School, by Lili Ott
Happy Birthday, Fidelia Bridges! by Katherine Manthorne
Esther Pressoir: Imagining the Modern Woman, by Suzanne Scanlan
The Ongoing Revival of Matilda Browne, American Impressionist, by Alexandra Kiely
The Floral Art of Emily Cole, by Erika Gaffney
Women Artists at the Cape Ann Museum, by Erika Gaffney
