Anne Whitney

Anne Whitney (September 2, 1821 – January 23, 1915) was an American sculptor and poet. She made full-length and bust sculptures of prominent political and historical figures, and her works are in major museums in the United States. She received prestigious commissions for monuments. Two statues of Samuel Adams were made by Whitney and are located in Washington, D.C.'s National Statuary Hall Collection and in front of Faneuil Hall in Boston. She also created two monuments to Leif Erikson.

Through her art, she expressed her liberal views regarding abolition, women's rights, and other social issues. Prominent historical figures are depicted in her sculptures, including Harriet Beecher Stowe. She portrayed women who lived ground-breaking lives as suffragists, professional artists, and non-traditional positions for women at the time, including noted economist and Wellesley College president Alice Freeman Palmer. Unusual for her era, she lived an unconventional, independent life and had a lifelong relationship with fellow artist, Abby Adeline Manning, with whom she lived and traveled to Europe.

Early life Anne Whitney was born in Watertown, Massachusetts, on September 2, 1821. Her sculpture of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1892) is at the Mark Twain House, and a bust is at the Day House, owned by the adjacent Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Hartford, Connecticut. The Uris Library at Cornell University houses the Jennie McGraw Fiske Medallion.

She completed statues and busts of other famous individuals, such as Edward Charles Pickering and James Walker, presidents of Harvard University. The busts are at the Harvard Art Museums. A replica of this fountain was cast at the request of Mariana Porter, and is located in West Newton, MA on the corner of Chestnut and Highland Streets, installed in memory of Anne Whitney's close friend, Catherine Porter Lambert (1817–1900), who also came from a family of abolitionists. Her last major work of art was the creation of the sculpture from the model of Charles Sumner sculpture from 1875. It was completed in 1902

Whitney also modeled for Cyrus Dallin's 1915 sculpture of Anne Hutchinson that is on the grounds of the Massachusetts State House. This same grouping was later incorporated into Dallin's 1922 Provincetown, Massachusetts sculpture Signing of the Mayflower Compact.

She is also not known for her active role in the expatriate communities in Rome, Florence, and France—where women were able to attain a richer educational experience and access to original works of art that was not afforded to women in the United States at that time. As Louisa May Alcott said in Little Women, when independent women felt the need to "go to Rome, and do fine pictures, and be the best artist in the whole world." Whitney said of Rome, "It is certain that there is not another city on this earth which gives so much (to me) for so little." Whitney's letters during that time provide insight into the importance of her time in Europe towards her artistic development.