Charles Sumner.

Charles Sumner.

Whitney, Anne, 1821-1915.; Sculpture, American.; Women sculptors.;

Plaster model of Charles Sumner by Anne Whitney. It was submitted in a contest for a memorial to be place in Boston Public Gardens. But when it was discovered that a woman had submitted the winning entry, it was decide to give the prize to the runner-up, a man named Thomas Ball, a well-know artist. It was declared that a woman could not do men's legs. Miss Whitney's friends and supports eventually raised enough money to create the statue and it now sits in Harvard Square. A well known supporter of both the abolitionist and suffragette movements, Whitney herself was to publicly feel the brunt of the sexism of the day when, in 1875, the commission for a statue of Charles Sumner that won a competition was denied her when it was discovered that the winning model was created by a woman. Among her well known public monuments is the statue of Samuel Adams (1876) located in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the United States Capitol, Washington D.C., the statue Leif the Discoverer (1887) in Boston, Massachusetts, with another edition that same year placed in Juneau Park, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Whitney was an accomplished portraitist, completing statues and busts of such well known individuals as John Keats, Samuel Adams, Toussaint l'Ouverture, William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, Frances Willard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Samuel Sewall, Alice Freeman Palmer, Robert Gould Shaw, Eben Norton Horsford, Harriet Martineau, Jennie McGraw Fiske, Lucy Stone and others.

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Sculpture

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