This albumen cdv by Edward Anthony, N.Y. is from a full length portrait by Mathew Brady and is a shoulder length portrait circa 1857. Harriot Hosmer (1830-1908) Harriet Hosmer was born at Watertown, Mass., and completed a course of study in Lenox, Mass.. She was a delicate child, and was encouraged by her father, a physician, to pursue a course of physical training by which she became expert in rowing, skating, and riding. She traveled alone in the wilderness of the western United States, and visited the Dakota Indians. She showed an early aptitude for modeling, and studied anatomy with her father. Through the influence of family friend Wayman Crow she would attend the anatomical instruction of Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell at the Missouri Medical College (then the medical department of the state university.) She then studied in Boston and practiced modeling at home until November 1852, when, with her father and her friend and likely lover Charlotte Cushman, she went to Rome, where from 1853 to 1860 she was the pupil of the Welsh sculptor John Gibson. While living in Rome, she was associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thorvaldsen, Thackeray, George Eliot, and George Sand; and she was frequently the guest of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning at Casa Guidi, in Florence. Novelist Henry James unflatteringly referred to the group of women artists in Rome of which she was the leader ‘The White Marmorean Flock,’ borrowing a term from Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Marble Faun. These artists included lesbians Anne Whitney, Emma Stebbins, African American sculpture Edmonia Lewis and non-lesbians Louisa Lander, Margaret Foley, Florence Freeman and Vinnie Ream. She was devoted for 25 years to Lady Ashburton, widow of Bingham Baring, 2nd Baron Ashbuton. Her works are held by many major art institutions across the U.S. (ref. Wikipedia 2014; Encyclopedia Britannia 2014).

Fine condition.