Fembio Special: Famous Women Poets
Anne Whitney
born September 2, 1821 in Watertown, Massachusetts
died January 23, 1915 in Boston, Massachusetts
American sculptor and poet
110th anniversary of her death on January 23, 2025
Biography
Henry James referred to the group of American sculptors (Harriet Hosmer, Emma Stebbins, among others) who had made a pilgrimage to Rome around the middle of the century as a “strange sisterhood of American 'lady sculptors' who at one time settled upon the seven hills in a white, marmorean flock.” Anne Whitney traveled to Europe four times and spent a total of five years there, but she stayed away from the flock.
Born in a venerable Boston family, she had received her education from private tutors. She was not allowed to marry the man she loved as there had supposedly been mentally ill people in his family. She weighed the options open to her as an unmarried woman with her sister. It was Adeline Manning, an artist who was fourteen years younger than Whitney, who would later become her partner.
Whitney first tried her hand as a teacher, then as a poet. While playing around with wet clay one day when she was in her mid-thirties, she discovered that she had a talent for molding. As it was not yet possible to travel to Rome due to the civil war, she began to study anatomy and started sculpting. Her first major work, Lady Godiva, was completed in 1861.
Meanwhile, a volume of her poetry had been published. She had been deeply influenced by Romanticism. Yet her poems and her sculptures were also shaped by Realism and reflect her interest in the social and political issues of the time. She had contacts with women's rights and abolition activists. Her liberal convictions and social engagement are particularly evident in two of her most famous works: Roma (1869), with the eternal city symbolically represented as a beggar, and the monumental female figure Harriet Martineau (1883). The latter was rejected by several Boston institutions before it was installed in the Wellesley College Hall, where Whitney had also taught.
Between the ages of 50 and 80, the sculptor received many important commissions: Samuel Adams (1873) for the Capitol Rotunda and Leif Eriksson (1887), which stands on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. In 1875, she also won an anonymous competition. However, when the jury realized the winning sculpture was the work of a woman, the commission was awarded to a man instead. Whitney wrote to her family: “Bury your grievance; it will take more than the Boston Art committee to quench me.” She was right: the larger-than-life bronze of Charles Sumner has stood in Harvard Square since 1902. It was to be her last major work.
She spent summers with her partner Adeline Manning in Shelburne, New Hampshire, starting in 1882. She gave up her studio in Boston. Her poems were revised and reorganized and privately published in 1906 shortly after Adeline’s death. Whitney outlived most of her contemporaries. When she died in 1915 at the Charlesgate Hotel, her work had already been forgotten.
(Text from 1995; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.
Please consult the German version for additional information, pictures, sources, videos, and bibliography.)
Quotes
...Whitney never lost sight of the political events of her day. In this respect, her outlook was quite different from that of other Americans, for whom travel to Europe offered the chance to step away from current concerns. (Lisa Reitzes, p. 46)
From a letter to her family, written when Whitney was in Rome: “First of all, the Woman Suffrage question should be settled. I cannot conceive such an outrage possible as the assumption of power to refuse it when the right is claimed.”
The following is an excerpt from “Even As A Rose,” a poem that Whitney wrote to her partner Adeline Manning. It concludes the volume of poetry that was published in 1906 (shortly after Manning's death).
The rest, the peace,
The strife of day outgrown.
We know the sign and heed the low command,
And hand in hand,
Bearing our treasure safe above the blight
And waste of years, - the slow surcease
Of life's full fount, - we journey free
With trust in the great mystery
Toward the fast-coming night.
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