“You may now write, ‘Veni, Vidi, Vici.’ The day has passed, the bust has been presented, all has gone well.”ⁱ This opening statement in a letter to Harriet Hosmer from Mr. James E. Yeatman of St. Louis on June 19, 1868 assured Hosmer that her surprise gift of a portrait bust to Wayman Crow, the founder of Washington University and patron of the arts, was accepted with joy and fanfare. Wayman Crow was a prominent dry goods merchant in St. Louis who won election to the state senate and became an advocate for education. In 1853 Crow drew up the charter for Washington University in St. Louis and put it through legislature. The charter was signed by Governor Sterling Price before Crow even informed the individuals he had listed as incorporators of their involvement in the successful founding of the university. He then provided the university with a renovated building at Nineteenth and Locust Streets in St. Louis for its art school and the first art museum west of the Mississippi River.ⁱⁱ

In honor of Wayman Crow’s establishment of Washington University, Hosmer requested that the portrait bust be presented to Crow at the university’s commencement ceremonies. Yeatman’s letter details the carefully orchestrated unveiling of the sculpture and Wayman Crow’s surprised reaction. A St. Louis journal described the event:

The marble bust of Wayman Crow, presented to the Washington University by our eminent American artist, Harriet Hosmer, was unveiled last evening in presence of a distinguished gathering of those connected with the college and interested in art. Among them were Wayman Crow and James E. Yeatman. Until the bust was unveiled Mr. Crow had no knowledge of it and his pleasure equaled his surprise. The bust, of white marble, rests upon a polished pedestal of a darker shade, supported by a carved pediment, the whole rising to a height of six feet. On the base of the bust and on the right and left sides of it, respectively, are carved

These inscriptions are its history, in them the epitome of the reason which moved its production. The face wears a calm and noble expression, a look full of meaning, an indescribable something which shows the work to be no less the language of the artist’s heart, than a faithful likeness of her friend.ⁱⁱⁱ

Hosmer’s gift to Wayman Crow was an expression of gratitude for their friendship and for the professional support and he had given her since she had first visited his home in St. Louis in 1850. Hosmer had befriended Crow’s daughter, Cornelia, while attending the progressive Mrs. Charles Sedgwick’s School in Lenox, Massachusetts. After graduating, Hosmer returned home to Watertown, Massachusetts for a brief time and then traveled to St. Louis to visit her friend Cornelia. While in St.Louis, she attended anatomy classes at Missouri Medical College, even though she had been prohibited from all-male medical schools on the east coast, and became the first woman to study anatomy at what later became the Washington University School of Medicine.^iv

When Hosmer later moved to Rome in 1852 to study under the English neoclassical sculptor John Gibson, Wayman Crow continued to offer her advice and professional support. In 1854 Hosmer worked on completing his commission for Oenone, her first full-length, life-size figural work, while Crow helped to arrange her commission for Beatrice Cenci.^v In 1860 he secured for her the commission for the bronze statue of Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Missouri’s first public sculpture, which is now in Lafayette Park in St. Louis.^vi Until his death in 1885, Crow maintained regular, friendly correspondence with Hosmer. In her letters to Crow, she often addressed him as ‘father’, acknowledging the paternal role he took on in his support of her career.^vii Crow’s devotion to Harriet Hosmer made him one of the most significant early patrons of the arts in St. Louis.<sup>viii


i</sup> Harriet Hosmer, Letters and Memories, ed. Cornelia Carr (New York: Moffat Yard and Company, 1912), 263.
ⁱⁱ George Mccue, Sculpture City St. Louis: Public Sculpture in the Gateway to the West, photographs by David Finn and Amy Binder ( New York: Hudson Hills Press. In association with Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, 1988), 41.
ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid., 24.
^iv Joseph D. Ketner and Jane E. Neidhart, A Gallery of Modern Art: at Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Gallery of Art, 1994), 56; also Dolly Sherwood, Harriet Hosmer, American Sculptor, 1830-1908 (Columbia & London: University of Missouri Press, 1991).
^v Hosmer, 39-40, 42.
^vi Ketner, 56; also Sherwood.
^vii Laura R. Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Cambridge, Massachusettes & London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 48.
^viii Ketner, 56.


Jodi Kovach
MA 2003