Katherine C. Walker's "American Studios in Rome and Florence," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, June 1866

Katherine C. Walker's "American Studios in Rome and Florence," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, June 1866

Artists--US American

Italy--Rome

Social Events--Studio Visits

Praise

Arts--Studio

Gossip--Published

Intimacy--As Source

Intimacy--With Subjects

Hosmer, Harriet Goodhue, 1830-1908

The article praises a range of US-American artists living and working in Rome, among who Story, Hosmer, Tilton, and Hiram Powers can be found. It advertises their studios to potential US-American travelers who pass through Rome on their way and should visit the respective studios.
The article also contradicts gossip spread about Hosmer and characterizes her as a hard-working, talented artist who is a pleasant person to meet and talk to.

Credit

Hathi Trust

Harper & Bros.

1866-06-00

Reference

[...] It is a lamentable truism that the representative American traveler prefers an indifferent bust or picture by an Italian or English artist to the best which his compatriots can achieve. [...] Miss Hosmer also is too well known in America by means of her peripatetic Zenobia, and her stationary Statesman, together with fascinating traditions still rife about Boston Common and the Piazza di Spagna in regard to youthful escapades and maturer deeds of prowess, to be overlooked by the representative American traveler. She, too, has the prestige of British patronage through her master Gibson, whose characteristic dictum, “Yes, yes, true art should be descriptive!" engraved in stone, is appropriately the legend of her studio. "We approached this celebrity with inward trepidation, on one of her weekly reception-days. Unlike Mr. Story, she does all her visitors the honor of receiving them in person, and it was pleasant to find a bright, piquant woman instead of the Amazon, bustling with weapons offensive, which our fancy had conjured from the shadowy realm of gossip. Her style of conversation is rather crisp than brusk, and she enters cord ially into her guest's admiration of her work. "With kindly patience she told over and again in our hearing to successive visitors the story of her brazen door, which, with its twelve bassi relieri representing the hours of night, is to shut in the treasures of an English nobleman‘s art gallery. But little Puck, rollicking little elf, won our hearts most of all among Miss Hosmer's marbles; and this not alone because the millennial state, wherein a little child shall lead all captive, has already begun with us, so that every thing fair, dimpled, and infantile attracts us. Puck seemed to us altogether the most spontaneous of the artist's works. A captive queen she never saw even in her dreams, but a mischievous morsel of humanity or fairyhood is native to a woman’s fancy. [...]

https://hdl.handle.net/2027/msu.31293022884831. Accessed 20. Sep 2021.

NYC, NY, US

40.7127281

-74.0060152

>1500