Harriet Goodhue Hosmer (1830-1908)
Harriet Goodhue Hosmer’s whimsical sculpture Puck, the mischievous boy made famous in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is an exception amongst her more stately and serious neoclassical works and has brought her international recognition. She completed this petit statue in 1854 while in Rome, and promptly sold it to the delighted Prince of Wales, who referred to it as “a laugh in marble.” Hosmer produced several copies of this model*, and its financial success enable her to pursue sculpture as a career.
She studied design and modeling in Boston and continued at McDowell Medical College in Saint Louis studying anatomy. At age 22, Hosmer traveled to Rome where she studied under the English sculptor, John Gibson. As her fame increased, so did the number of lucrative commissions. Among her patrons and acquaintances were notable members of the British aristocracy as well as fellow artists and writers such as Elizabeth and Robert Browning and Nathaniel Hawthorne, yet she always remained connected to Saint Louis.
Hosmer’s lifelong relationship with the Saint Louis Wayman Crow family initiated a tremendous artistic legacy for the city. The family received some of her most famous works as gifts from the artist: a bust of “Daphne” and statue of “Cenone” (her first two sculptures executed in Rome), and later a bust of Wayman Crow presented to Washington University to commemorate him as one of the University’s founders. The Mercantile Library is home to one of its own commissions, the serene Beatrice Cenci, and Saint Louis boasts Hosmer’s first public monument, a bronze statue of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, which still stands in Lafayette Park.
Hosmer’s artistic contributions have been recognized in exhibitions at the Vassar College Art Gallery in 1972 and more recently at the Whitney Museum, and she is included in the collections of the Boston Athenaeum and Saint Louis Art Museum.
* for one of these versions of Puck, see p4A.com item no. 155015.