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Vinnie Ream: An American Sculptor
She was able, through clever maneuvering and dogged determination, to achieve a commission from the Congress for a life-sized statue of the assassinated president—this despite the very real animus against women artists at that time, which is apparent in the heated arguments against granting her the Lincoln commission—arguments spearheaded in the Senate by Charles Sumner of Massachusetts.
Steeped in the history of her time, Vinnie Ream was involved with dozens of senators and congressmen and other powerful men—not least of all Generals Sherman and Custer—and her studio on Capitol Hill became a legendary stopping place for many admirers and tourists. Her statue of Lincoln stands in the rotunda of the capitol building; her statue of Admiral Farragut stands in a Washington, D.C. park; other works are in Statuary Hall and various museums. This is an engaging biography of a spirited female artist, and an effective portrait of Washington, D.C. in the Civil War era.
Steeped in the history of her time, Vinnie Ream was involved with dozens of senators and congressmen and other powerful men—not least of all Generals Sherman and Custer—and her studio on Capitol Hill became a legendary stopping place for many admirers and tourists. Her statue of Lincoln stands in the rotunda of the capitol building; her statue of Admiral Farragut stands in a Washington, D.C. park; other works are in Statuary Hall and various museums. This is an engaging biography of a spirited female artist, and an effective portrait of Washington, D.C. in the Civil War era.
- GenresArt
300 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 2004
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September 17, 2020
There are stunningly few books on Vinnie Ream despite her being a huge part of 19th century DC high society. This was the only biography I could afford.
Before I talk about Vinnie, a little context on the scene she eventually breaks into: female American sculptors of the mid-to-late 19th century.
As you can imagine, career artistry was not particular welcoming to women. Women can't be artists! Tsk! Run along, little girl.
Of course, many women did become celebrated and successful artists in ages where patronage dictated success. Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun was THE portraitist of the French Court leading up to the French Revolution. (That famous blue and silver portrait of Marie Antoinette with the rose? That's hers.)
But sculpture, well, that was a tougher game to break into for women (among other people). Because sculpture isn't like painting. It's way more expensive. Sure, you can sculpt in clay and then make a basic plaster cast, but that won't pay the bills for long. Same thing with medallions: shorter assignments with cheaper materials, but still chump change. Forget about marble, stone, or bronze. Most sculptors didn't do their own carving in the 19th century. Instead, they made the model in clay, then made a plaster cast of it and hired actual carving artisans (the best being those in Rome, Italy) to do the carving work expertly. The artist might do the finishing touches if they knew enough about carving marble.
So imagine being a woman in this area that is already notoriously difficult to break into: what do you need?
First, you'll need the education, either formal or informal. The problem was, a big part of artistic education comes from access to art: and most people didn't have that. Boston was one of the few places where you could find statue copies in plaster for students to examine and sketch. But not the women! Nope. The Boston Atheneum did not let women see naked statues. Cover those indignities up, sir. There are ladies present!
So that brings us to the second point: women could get the education via money, connections, or both. Harriet Hosmer, for example, is one of the most talent sculptors of this era. She was wealthy, her father was a doctor who got her access to anatomy studies, and she had the benefit of attending the incredibly advanced Sedgewick School. When she realized she could pursue a more lucrative and artistically challenging career in Rome, she up and left, taking her father and his medical practice with her. Done and DONE.
Don't get me wrong, her sculptures are beautiful. But I don't know if we would have her works of art today if she had been missing one of these incredible advantages (and I'm glad she had them because her sculpture are GORGEOUS). (Also she was unabashedly lesbian and had a relationship with Charlotte Cushman and god, just go read about her.)
Then we have sculptors like Edmonia Lewis, who was half Ojibwe, half Haitian-American. Yes, during slavery. But Edmonia was born in New York state and had, thank goodness, the support of prominent abolitionists. More importantly, she was born poor but later came into money when her brother moved west, established a successful barber business in the mining community, and eventually became very prosperous. (Remember the gold rush? Good place to be a barber. Think of all the neckbeards.) Anyway, between Edmonia's access to abolitionist, integrated schools and eventually an education at Oberlin College (which didn't end well because of racism, mob rule, and a very weird murder trial... and also she nearly died at the hands of a mob so... not good), she had more benefits than other African-American women of her age who may also have held talent in the arts. The important thing is: she also moved to Rome and hung out with Harriet Hosmer. Please check out her Cleopatra statue.
ALL THIS CONTEXT TO SAY:
Vinnie did not have the experiences that other female sculptors did. Her benefits and obstacles were different. She definitely didn't have to deal with racism. But she did have to deal with sexism and class. Especially class. Because Vinnie, talented as she was, did not have an artistic education. She had some education at a girls' school, though nothing prestigious. She had no wealth and definitely no connection to the artistic scene. She was the daughter of a surveyor and part of a roaming family that went from state to state, never settling where for long. She returned to DC as a teen, with her father too sickly to work more than part-time. Her brother ran away to join the Confederacy (aaaaaarghhhh), leaving Vinnie, her sister, and her mother to help make a living in D.C., the swampiest city during the civil war.
Vinnie started by getting a job at the U.S. Post Office. She got into the good graces of a Senator she had met back west (as a young teen, like, she was 12-13 years old). And needless to say, the letters this biography quotes suggest that this Senator had more than just a fatherly interest in Vinnie. And I'm not judging Vinnie. Poverty was a scary thing in a city bordering a war (and DC had to evacuate a few times, too). She couldn't rely on her father. We don't even know what her family thought of her relationships to this senator or the many, many other men who bolstered her career. But anyway, it led to one thing: an apprenticeship with a sculptor, and a new source of income doing sculpture work of her own.
Cooper's biography of Vinnie Ream does an excellent job of showing how Vinnie both established relationships with some of the most powerful men in D.C. and won the first U.S. government commission awarded to a woman: the first statue of Lincoln after his assassination. She was nineteen. And the story goes that she was a prodigy that impressed her supporters with sheer talent. Cooper doesn't diminish that. He agrees that Vinnie was talented and hardworking. She didn't even study ANATOMY before the bid. She practically SUGGESTED the statue commission project. But her artistic talent alone didn't get her there.
It couldn't, logically. She was really good! But at the time, she was young and new to sculpture, and she never got the training or sufficient time to hone her skills. She didn't have access to statue outside of those displayed in parks in D.C. But where she lacked connections and support, she sought it out. Cooper doesn't judge her for having relationships with much older men. In fact, he credits her ingenuity at creating a whole P.R. persona and also depicts the complex relationship Vinnie had with women. The women who supported Harriet Hosmer did not support Vinnie because Vinnie was, well, poor, and also had to put herself in unseemly situations with men publicly and privately. Not to mention that if Vinnie openly sided with women's suffrage, she risked losing the men who constituted her main support. She never got to move to Rome. She could barely finance the trip she needed to go there to have the Lincoln statue carved.
(In a nice turn, all the famous women sculptors visited her in Italy during her stay. When American newspapers accused Vinnie of having hired men to sculpt the statue for her in Italy, Harriet Hosmer personally wrote to Vinnie to voice her support and contest the accusations, even suggesting that Vinnie sue for libel. That was a big deal in the age where letters of that sort were published as legit overseas news.)
Were some of the men she consorted with super problematic? Oh, definitely. Like, the last person I expected to see in this book was Albert Pike. Remember that statue that got pulled down in D.C.? The Southerner with the mediocre military career? Same guy. What did Vinnie see in him?? Probably influence and money. More important to Vinnie's needs, Pike gave Vinnie access to a whole network of connections and patronage: the Freemasons.
At the end of the day, I don't want a clean, non-problematic version of Vinnie. I'd rather see her with warts and all. (But by all accounts, Pike was a very creepy dude. Like, the kind to insist that Vinnie not get married and also make a big show of their relationship, again with MUCH creepiness. And heaps of poems. Arghhh.)
(By the way, NO, Vinnie did not sculpt the Albert Pike statue. Just to be clear.)
In any case, I came to Vinnie Ream with the idea of a talented ingenue who won a blind contest to sculpt Lincoln. I didn't have the context to appreciate the P.R. value of this story or the complicated work behind the scenes. I didn't know Vinnie's life or the compromises she made. And I also didn't know that her statues were still displayed in D.C., with her best statue, Sappho, existing in marble at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and cast in bronze over her grave in Arlington Cemetery.
Cooper must have had a lot more material than what he eventually fit into the book, but he did a wonderful job at recreating Vinnie's life, her conflicts, her successes and setbacks. She's a real human in the book, and I really admire that Cooper succeeded in conjuring her as such.
Recommended for anyone interested in history, feminism, antebellum D.C., and the 19th century sculpting scene.
Before I talk about Vinnie, a little context on the scene she eventually breaks into: female American sculptors of the mid-to-late 19th century.
As you can imagine, career artistry was not particular welcoming to women. Women can't be artists! Tsk! Run along, little girl.
Of course, many women did become celebrated and successful artists in ages where patronage dictated success. Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun was THE portraitist of the French Court leading up to the French Revolution. (That famous blue and silver portrait of Marie Antoinette with the rose? That's hers.)
But sculpture, well, that was a tougher game to break into for women (among other people). Because sculpture isn't like painting. It's way more expensive. Sure, you can sculpt in clay and then make a basic plaster cast, but that won't pay the bills for long. Same thing with medallions: shorter assignments with cheaper materials, but still chump change. Forget about marble, stone, or bronze. Most sculptors didn't do their own carving in the 19th century. Instead, they made the model in clay, then made a plaster cast of it and hired actual carving artisans (the best being those in Rome, Italy) to do the carving work expertly. The artist might do the finishing touches if they knew enough about carving marble.
So imagine being a woman in this area that is already notoriously difficult to break into: what do you need?
First, you'll need the education, either formal or informal. The problem was, a big part of artistic education comes from access to art: and most people didn't have that. Boston was one of the few places where you could find statue copies in plaster for students to examine and sketch. But not the women! Nope. The Boston Atheneum did not let women see naked statues. Cover those indignities up, sir. There are ladies present!
So that brings us to the second point: women could get the education via money, connections, or both. Harriet Hosmer, for example, is one of the most talent sculptors of this era. She was wealthy, her father was a doctor who got her access to anatomy studies, and she had the benefit of attending the incredibly advanced Sedgewick School. When she realized she could pursue a more lucrative and artistically challenging career in Rome, she up and left, taking her father and his medical practice with her. Done and DONE.
Don't get me wrong, her sculptures are beautiful. But I don't know if we would have her works of art today if she had been missing one of these incredible advantages (and I'm glad she had them because her sculpture are GORGEOUS). (Also she was unabashedly lesbian and had a relationship with Charlotte Cushman and god, just go read about her.)
Then we have sculptors like Edmonia Lewis, who was half Ojibwe, half Haitian-American. Yes, during slavery. But Edmonia was born in New York state and had, thank goodness, the support of prominent abolitionists. More importantly, she was born poor but later came into money when her brother moved west, established a successful barber business in the mining community, and eventually became very prosperous. (Remember the gold rush? Good place to be a barber. Think of all the neckbeards.) Anyway, between Edmonia's access to abolitionist, integrated schools and eventually an education at Oberlin College (which didn't end well because of racism, mob rule, and a very weird murder trial... and also she nearly died at the hands of a mob so... not good), she had more benefits than other African-American women of her age who may also have held talent in the arts. The important thing is: she also moved to Rome and hung out with Harriet Hosmer. Please check out her Cleopatra statue.
ALL THIS CONTEXT TO SAY:
Vinnie did not have the experiences that other female sculptors did. Her benefits and obstacles were different. She definitely didn't have to deal with racism. But she did have to deal with sexism and class. Especially class. Because Vinnie, talented as she was, did not have an artistic education. She had some education at a girls' school, though nothing prestigious. She had no wealth and definitely no connection to the artistic scene. She was the daughter of a surveyor and part of a roaming family that went from state to state, never settling where for long. She returned to DC as a teen, with her father too sickly to work more than part-time. Her brother ran away to join the Confederacy (aaaaaarghhhh), leaving Vinnie, her sister, and her mother to help make a living in D.C., the swampiest city during the civil war.
Vinnie started by getting a job at the U.S. Post Office. She got into the good graces of a Senator she had met back west (as a young teen, like, she was 12-13 years old). And needless to say, the letters this biography quotes suggest that this Senator had more than just a fatherly interest in Vinnie. And I'm not judging Vinnie. Poverty was a scary thing in a city bordering a war (and DC had to evacuate a few times, too). She couldn't rely on her father. We don't even know what her family thought of her relationships to this senator or the many, many other men who bolstered her career. But anyway, it led to one thing: an apprenticeship with a sculptor, and a new source of income doing sculpture work of her own.
Cooper's biography of Vinnie Ream does an excellent job of showing how Vinnie both established relationships with some of the most powerful men in D.C. and won the first U.S. government commission awarded to a woman: the first statue of Lincoln after his assassination. She was nineteen. And the story goes that she was a prodigy that impressed her supporters with sheer talent. Cooper doesn't diminish that. He agrees that Vinnie was talented and hardworking. She didn't even study ANATOMY before the bid. She practically SUGGESTED the statue commission project. But her artistic talent alone didn't get her there.
It couldn't, logically. She was really good! But at the time, she was young and new to sculpture, and she never got the training or sufficient time to hone her skills. She didn't have access to statue outside of those displayed in parks in D.C. But where she lacked connections and support, she sought it out. Cooper doesn't judge her for having relationships with much older men. In fact, he credits her ingenuity at creating a whole P.R. persona and also depicts the complex relationship Vinnie had with women. The women who supported Harriet Hosmer did not support Vinnie because Vinnie was, well, poor, and also had to put herself in unseemly situations with men publicly and privately. Not to mention that if Vinnie openly sided with women's suffrage, she risked losing the men who constituted her main support. She never got to move to Rome. She could barely finance the trip she needed to go there to have the Lincoln statue carved.
(In a nice turn, all the famous women sculptors visited her in Italy during her stay. When American newspapers accused Vinnie of having hired men to sculpt the statue for her in Italy, Harriet Hosmer personally wrote to Vinnie to voice her support and contest the accusations, even suggesting that Vinnie sue for libel. That was a big deal in the age where letters of that sort were published as legit overseas news.)
Were some of the men she consorted with super problematic? Oh, definitely. Like, the last person I expected to see in this book was Albert Pike. Remember that statue that got pulled down in D.C.? The Southerner with the mediocre military career? Same guy. What did Vinnie see in him?? Probably influence and money. More important to Vinnie's needs, Pike gave Vinnie access to a whole network of connections and patronage: the Freemasons.
At the end of the day, I don't want a clean, non-problematic version of Vinnie. I'd rather see her with warts and all. (But by all accounts, Pike was a very creepy dude. Like, the kind to insist that Vinnie not get married and also make a big show of their relationship, again with MUCH creepiness. And heaps of poems. Arghhh.)
(By the way, NO, Vinnie did not sculpt the Albert Pike statue. Just to be clear.)
In any case, I came to Vinnie Ream with the idea of a talented ingenue who won a blind contest to sculpt Lincoln. I didn't have the context to appreciate the P.R. value of this story or the complicated work behind the scenes. I didn't know Vinnie's life or the compromises she made. And I also didn't know that her statues were still displayed in D.C., with her best statue, Sappho, existing in marble at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and cast in bronze over her grave in Arlington Cemetery.
Cooper must have had a lot more material than what he eventually fit into the book, but he did a wonderful job at recreating Vinnie's life, her conflicts, her successes and setbacks. She's a real human in the book, and I really admire that Cooper succeeded in conjuring her as such.
Recommended for anyone interested in history, feminism, antebellum D.C., and the 19th century sculpting scene.
May 17, 2010
This is a wonderful book. I highly recommend it and can't wait to visit D.C. to see her works.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews