Page:The Overland Monthly, Jan-June 1894.djvu/287

1894.] reach her side to rescue her from the back of the plunging animal, when a sly cut of her whip sent his own horse madly ahead, and at the same instant Miss Harriet's, in perfect control, took a neighboring fence with a flying leap, and disappeared across the fields. This was but one of many stories that circulated among the young people of Boston of that day, concerning the results of Doctor Hosmer's system with a delicate daughter whom he feared to lose. Miss Hosmer is today a model of health and good cheer,—vivacious, sensible and entertaining; and I doubt not able to take her gallop across the fields as of yore, for she is one who will never grow old.

She was born an artist, but she did not come to her inheritance without severe training and many hindrances. In the first place, desiring to study anatomy as a preparation for her art work, she found the doors of the medical colleges shut against her. At last, in St. Louis, she was permitted to take the needed studies, and followed them for three years. She did some modeling in this country, but her real work began in Rome. Her father and Charlotte Cushman accompanied her thither. She worked in John Gibson's studio, copying from the antique, learning the technique of her art, and meanwhile developing her own taste and idealism. Ideal busts of Daphne and Medusa were among her first works; her first full-size statue was of Ænone. Her statue of Puck, an original and spirited work, was done in 1855. Many copies of this were made, one for the Prince of Wales; and her growing reputation abroad soon reached America, and became a matter of great pride. Following Puck came a companion, The Will-o'-the-Wisp; an ideal reclining statue of Beatrice di Cenci; a colossal figure of Zenobia, of great beauty and nobility; one of Thomas K. Benton for St. Louis, where her Beatrice also is owned; and a monument to Abraham Lincoln. Many later works of hers are in England, in Boston, and in New York, and a few in California; one of these is a bust of Remi Chabot, of Oakland.

Miss Hosmer's home is in Rome, where she is an important figure in art circles, and a great favorite socially. It was a very daring thing for her to do, as a young girl, especially an American girl, to step into the art arena of Rome; but she has conquered her place completely, both personally and as an artist. She came from Rome last September to place her statue in Jackson Park, but a fate kindlier to California than Chicago has given the honor to us instead.

Miss Hosmer has unusual inventive ability in constructing and designing machinery, and has devised a new process of converting the ordinary limestone of Italy into marble, and also one for modeling the first shape of the statue by covering the rough plaster with wax, and thus working out the finer lines. It was a model of this sort of the Isabella statue that Mrs. May Wright Sewall saw in Rome, and described so vividly at the dedication of the little Queen Isabella Pampas Palace.

California has now a rare opportunity to follow up the advantage that little palace gave her. It would be a great thing if the ladies of California would unite to secure the needed funds to cast the statue in bronze, to remain here. In arranging to have it brought out, Mrs. Strong also secured for California the right to cast the first bronze. As the statue of James Lick is now being cast in San Francisco, it would be a fine thing to follow with one of the great queen. It would show a combination of women's work better than forty women's buildings filled with laces and embroideries. The Sixteenth Century woman appeared, let us hope for the last time, at the Columbian Exposition. California should be proud to show in the handiwork of the woman of the Nineteenth Century the image of the queen who was four hundred years in advance of the men in her time; how far in advance of the women it remains to be seen.

Californian.