Deutsche Bank
Desperately Seeking Harriet
The American artist Patricia Cronin on the trail of aforgotten sculptress
Patricia Cronin’s sculpture Memorial to a Marriage has
attracted considerable attention. She installed the pairof naked women in white marble in the middle of theWoodlawn Cemetery in New York, on the grave she will
one day share with her girlfriend. Currently, the artist is afellow at the American Academy in Rome, where she’s
busy researching the work of a 19th-century sculptressonce steeped in scandal. The project is also funded by theNew York Foundation for the Arts, which awarded her theDeutsche Bank Fellowship 2007.
While George W. Bush met with minister president Romano
Prodi and opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi on a recentvisit to Rome, his wife Laura set sight on the city’s culture.
The First Lady visited the Quirinal Palace, explored thenecropolis beneath St. Peter’s Cathedral, and dropped by
the American Academy, where she also visited an exhibitionby the artist Patricia Cronin. Cronin’s monochrome
watercolors depict sculptures by Harriet Hosmer, anAmerican sculptress who lived thirty years in Rome. Theartist was famous during the final decades of the 19thcentury, if not a bit infamous. Today, she is largely forgotten.
And so Laura Bush was confronted with not one, but two
women whose way of life defies conservative conventions.
It’s doubtful that the president’s wife was shown the erotic
gouaches Patricia Cronin made her name with in the midnineties. The explicit close-ups depict the artist having sex
with her girlfriend, the painter Deborah Kass. Monument
to a Marriage (2002) also celebrates their love – this timein marble, in the Neo-Classicist style of the 19th century.
The white sculpture shows the two women on a bed in an
intimate embrace; their naked bodies are clearly visible
beneath a thin sheet. Cronin installed the three-ton workin the Woodlawn Cemetery, on the grave she will one day
share with her lover.

Patricia Cronin
Memorial to a Marriage
Woodlawn Friedhof
Photo: Lee Sandstead

Patricia Cronin
The Sleeping Faun By Harriet Hosmer, 1865
The Harriet Hosmer Catalogue Raisonne Project© Patricia Cronin

The cemetery, which is frequently regarded as the New Yorkversion of the Père Lachaise in Paris, is home to the gravesof American icons such as Herman Melville, Duke Ellington,and Miles Davis; the last six mayors of New York City and anumber of honorable congressmen and senators also rest inpeace here. Cronin smuggled a subversive monument into
the midst of the melancholy angels, broken columns, andmausoleums built in the style of medieval castles or antique
temples. A lesbian love death as a monument to a marriage
that, according to the law, never existed.
Patricia Cronin
Memorial to a Marriage© Patricia CroninDeutsche Bank
In the course of her research for the sculpture, Cronin
happened upon Harriet Hosmer – the first woman to makea career as a sculptress. The life of the 1830-born American
would supply an ideal subject for a feminist novel. Because
he lost his other children and his wife to tuberculosis,
Harriet’s father raised her like a son. The doctor wasconvinced that he could only arm his daughter against thedreaded disease through strenuous physical exercise. It
quickly emerged that the athletically talented girl could not
only ride and shoot splendidly, but was artistically gifted
as well. As a result, her father set up her first studio, whilea doctor friend taught her the basic principles of anatomy.
Harriet refused to comply with the traditional women’srole, preferring men’s clothing and even daring to travel theMississippi without a chaperone. One of her early sculptures
attracted the attention of Charlotte Cushman. The lesbian
actress with a weakness for male roles was about toembark for Rome. She convinced Harriet’s father to allow
his daughter to accompany her there. There was hardly achance for the young artist to develop in the United States,
because most art academies refused to admit women.
In Rome, Hosmer’s talent impressed the English sculptor
John Gibson, who took on the 22-year-old as his onlystudent. His Neo-Classicist works, influenced by Canovaand Thorwaldsen, left their mark on her developing style.
She quickly enjoyed her first successes with her marble
sculptures and sold 50 copies of her Puck – one of them tothe Prince of Wales.

Will o’ the Wisp, 1858
Harriet Hosmer
Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum

She often based her works on heroines of antiquity, suchas the Syrian queen Zenobia who stood up to the Roman
Empire, and successfully defended herself in court against
rumors that she herself didn’t create her sculptures, but herworkshop staff. In Rome, she belonged to a literary circle
that included Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, andsculptresses such as Anne Whitney, Edmonia Lewis, andEmma Stebbins. Women without men, whom James called
a “strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors.’” Even
the Queen of Naples posed for Hosmer, who remained trueto herself in Italy as well, wearing men’s jackets and sporting
short hair. Today, hardly anything has remained of her former
fame: although she is represented in the collections ofmany important museums, Harriet Hosmer has been largelyforgotten.
Now, Patricia Cronin has set out to change this with herseries Harriet Hosmer Catalogue Raisonné. In researching
the causes of the artist’s disappearance, Cronin asks whobecomes part of (art) history and who is deleted from it. She
began her search in New York and continued the projectupon her arrival in Rome, tracking down Hosmer’s works as
though for a customary catalogue raisonné, an illustrated
overview of an artist’s entire work. Cronin does not

Zenobia By Harriet Hosmer,The Harriet Hosmer Catalogue Raisonne Project© Patricia CroninDeutsche Bank
photograph the sculptures, however, but records them inwatercolor, a medium that lends itself particularly well to theplay of light on marble. The watercolors are accompaniedby handwritten texts on the history of the sculptures. TheNew York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, sponsored by
Deutsche Bank, will enable her to soon publish the painted
catalogue of works as an artist’s book.
Cronin’s exhibition in Rome depicts Hosmer’ sculptures inchronological order. In between are often sheets of paper onwhich a statue is merely alluded to. “There’s one sculptureof Hattie’s which has completely disappeared, a life-sized
rendering of Maria Sofia, Queen of Naples, with whom
Hattie had an affair,” as the artist explains in an interview. All
that exists are descriptions of the work, which the London
Art Journal once termed her “crowning achievement.”
Cronin has converted these notes into forms that seemalmost ghostly. They not only evoke lost sculpture; theyalso stand for an extinguished career that Patrician Cronin’s
project seeks to salvage from obscurity.
Achim Drucks
find this article : http://www.db-artmag.com/archiv/2007/e/3/5/542.
html?dbiquery=1:patricia%20cronin

Medusa By Harriet Hosmer,
The Harriet Hosmer Catalogue Raisonne Project© Patricia CroninBook Cover
The Harriet Hosmer Catalogue Raisonne Project© Patricia Cronin

Mermaid’s Cradle By Harriet Hosmer,
The Harriet Hosmer Catalogue Raisonne Project© Patricia Cronin