Whitney, Anne

WHITNEY, ANNE (1821-1915). One of the few women to succeed as a sculptor in nineteenth-century America, Whitney specialized in themes of social justice. She depicted heroes of freedom, especially fighters for women’s rights and the emancipation of African American slaves. Born in Watertown, Massachusetts, she grew up in a family of Unitarians and abolitionists and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and, later, in studios in Rome. While in Italy, she took in the political excitement of the republican movement around Giuseppe Maria Garibaldi. In 1871, she returned to the United States to exhibit her sculpture of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture. Whitney produced many sculptures of well-known abolitionists, such as Charles Sumner and William Lloyd Garrison, and woman suffragists, such as Frances Willard.

Whitney advocated several progressive causes including abolitionism, conservation, woman suffrage, and equal education of women and African Americans and was known herself as a strong-minded woman in promoting her views. In the 1890s, she joined the Bellamy Nationalist movement and became active in a chapter in Boston, where she made her home. She hosted meetings and contributed financially to the organization.

Payne, Elizabeth Rogers, “Anne Whitney, Art and Social Justice,” Massachusetts Review 12(Spring 1971), 245-60.

Papers of Anne Whitney, MSS-4. Wellesley College Digital Archives and Scholarship. https://repository.wellesley.edu/whitney/