Harriet Hosmer : a cultural biography /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Culkin, Kate, 1969-
Imprint:Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, ©2010.
Description:1 online resource (xiii, 219 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates) : illustrations
Language:English
Subject:
Format: E-Resource Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11300970
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9781613760154
1613760159
9781558498396
1558498397
9781558498389
1558498389
Notes:OldControl:muse9781613760154.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Print version record.
Summary:Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) was celebrated as one of the country's most respected artists, credited with opening the field of sculpture to women and cited as a model of female ability and American refinement. In this biographical study, Kate Culkin explores Hosmer's life and work and places her in the context of a notable group of expatriate writers and artists who gathered in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century.
In 1852 Hosmer moved from Boston to Rome, where she shared a house with actress Charlotte Cushman and soon formed close friendships with such prominent expatriates as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and fellow sculptors John Gibson, Emma Stebbins, and William Wetmore Story. References to Hosmer or characters inspired by her appear in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Kate Field among others.
Culkin argues that Hosmer's success was made possible by her extensive network of supporters, including her famous friends, boosters of American gentility, and women's rights advocates. This unlikely coalition, along with her talent, ambition, and careful maintenance of her public profile, ultimately brought her great acclaim. Culkin also addresses Hosmer's critique of women's position in nineteenth-century culture through her sculpture, women's rights advocates' use of high art to promote their cause, the role Hosmer's relationships with women played in her life and success, and the complex position a female artist occupied within a country increasingly interested in proving its gentility. --Book Jacket.
Other form:Print version: Culkin, Kate, 1969- Harriet Hosmer. Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, ©2010
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

American artist Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) was one of the most famous female American sculptors of the 19th century, friend of Robert and Elizabeth Browning and professionally supported by such prominent women as Lydia Maria Child and Susan B. Anthony. Adventurous and outspoken, Hosmer was aided by her wealthy New England family's financial support and her own social connections to launch her successful career as an artist, although she was virtually forgotten until the 1990s. In this fluid and lucid biography, historian Culkin aims to establish Hosmer as "a woman whose biography opens a window onto her time." Some of its most interesting aspects concern Hosmer as a woman attracted to other women who challenged gender conventions in appearance and behavior. While Hosmer's story is potentially fascinating, and she was a woman who skillfully used social and even romantic connections to advance her career, Culkin does not provide cultural history in enough depth, and some of her extrapolations linking Culkin's artistic intentions with her gender and sexuality are not fully convincing. More monograph than complete cultural biography, this will be of great interest to art historians of the period and scholars of 19th-century American women's history. 30 illus. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review