of Incest and Female Relations in Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci

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Hosmer befriended Cornelia Crow, who would become a lifetime friend, confidante, and an important link to her father, Wayman Crow, with whom Hosmer first became ac- quainted while visiting the family in 1850. A dry-goods mer- chant, Crow was a civic-minded citizen and politician in- volved in many public and private organizations. He was president of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce for ten years, served two terms in the Missouri State Senate, secured in 1846 the charter for the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association (the city's first public library), and in 1853 founded the Eliot Seminary, which three years later became Washington University. He also provided this educational institution with an art school and the first art museum west of the Mississippi River. Crow quickly became the young sculptor's first benefactor, advocate, patron, and mentor. He persuaded Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell of the Missouri Medical College to tutor Hosmer in anatomy, since she could not take classes in the all-male medical school. When Hosmer's father withdrew his financial support in January 1854 because of money prob- lems, Crow provided funds, "setting her up," as she wrote appreciatively, "as an artist." The following year, Crow com- missioned her first full-length, life-size figure, Oenone (ca. 1855). Six years later, he secured for her the state commission to create a bronze statue of Senator Thomas Hart Ben- ton. Crow and Hosmer corresponded until his death in 1885, Hosmer signing her letters "your affectionate daughter," in- voking "a personal, familial relationship to explain a profes- sional connection." 19 295
296 Appropriate and popular sculptural subjects would have been a captive Indian woman (in the vein of Erastus Dow Palmer, The White Captive, 1858-59, Fig. 5), the ignoble and "savage" native (Horatio Greenough, Rescue, 1837-53, Fig. 6), the disappearing Native American race (Thomas Crawford, The Indian: Dying Chief, 1856, Fig. 7), or a historical Indian figure (Joseph Mozier, Pocahontas, 1877, Fig. 8). Hosmer, who had previously treated heroic women in a mythological and clas- sical context, would have had to depart from the content of her oeuvre to produce such an Indian figure or white captive. Instead, she selected a subject from Italian history that would help to bring high culture to St. Louis, a city she claimed to love because "it was there I first began my studies" and because of the "many generous and indulgent friends who . . . ministered to the growth of the Arts and Sciences." 21 Cenci's whiteness, manifest in the statue's white marble, which nevertheless has some dark veins, is consistent with the library's raison d'etre—westward expansion—for its color signifies Euro-American settlers in opposition to dark-skinned Native Americans. Although the racial Other is absent, the statue's very whiteness signifies this other absent presence. It is thus ironic that her patron both supported and was a part of the white patriarchy that Hosmer critiques through her statue. It may be that obtaining the commission for this statue through her "second father," Wayman Crow, made her un- easy, either because of Crow's reach into her life or her natural father's abandonment of her. The choice of a subject connected with incest and patricide, for a sculpture made possible by a father figure, may be significant. Could this statue be also an allegory about good fathers and bad fathers? And one of possibly larger civic implications (that is, Crow as a benign and responsible civic figure, a good father to his surrogate daughter as well as to the city of St. Louis, versus the evil father Cenci, a rogue and a tyrant, and the ultimate bad father)? Hosmer was a shrewd businesswoman who realized that her subject would appeal to Americans who had been on the grand tour, as well as to the literary and artistic expatriate crowd in Rome and those who would see the statue at the Royal Academy in London. These viewers most certainly would have been familiar with the sixteenth-century Italian
Page 1 and 2: The "Ghosting" of Incest and Female
Page 3: 294 ing role in reading the narrati
Page 7 and 8: 298 dramatic potential of the story
Page 9 and 10: 300 empty because the chain is repl
Page 11 and 12: 302 One look, one smile." (Wildly.)
Page 13 and 14: 304 mer's sympathy with this femini
Page 15 and 16: 306 left me." In late 1854, Hays le
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of Incest and Female Relations in Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci

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