“I am making a statue now that is to become yours one of these days. It makes me so happy to think that you will all have the very first things I send from Rome, – my first bust and first statue.”ⁱ The statue Harriet Hosmer mentioned in this letter to the Crow family on Oct. 30, 1854 was her marble sculpture of the mythical naiad of Mount Ida, Oenone. Commissioned by her life-long patron and friend Wayman Crow of St. Louis, Oenone was Hosmer’s first life-size, full-length sculpture, which she completed in Rome under the tutelage of the English neoclassical sculptor John Gibson.ⁱⁱ

The story of Oenone became well known in the mid-nineteenth century with the 1832 and 1842 publications of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem Oenone. Hosmer was familiar with Tennyson’s mournful retelling of the ancient myth when she carved her statue based on the same theme. With his poem, Tennyson focused on the tragic love that Oenone, daughter of the river-god Oeneus, felt for her husband Paris when he abandoned her for Helen in the episode that sparked the Trojan War. After the fall of Troy, the mortally wounded Paris returned to Oenone who refused to help him. She then lamented over his death and committed suicide in remorse.ⁱⁱⁱ Hosmer’s sculptural interpretation of the story shows Oenone looking downward in mourning but with a serene expression and idealized form characteristic of the neoclassical style. She is alone, with only a shepherd’s crook to identify her as the rustic nymph of fountains and streams.^iv It is unclear as to whether Hosmer has depicted Oenone in mourning over her husband’s cruel desertion or his death after her refusal to help him. This ambiguity is characteristic of Hosmer’s depictions of female characters at the ambivalent moment between helpless victimization and dangerous powerfulness. The inward pose of the figure reveals an introspective dimension to the character that is unique to interpretations of the tragic story of Oenone and Paris. With her statue Oenone, Hosmer has provided a retelling of the story from the female character’s perspective about the helplessness and simultaneous vengeful power of the female victim.<sup>v


i</sup> Harriet Hosmer, Letters and Memories, ed. Cornelia Carr (New York: Moffat Yard and Company, 1912), 42.
ⁱⁱ Dolly Sherwood, Harriet Hosmer, American Sculptor, 1830-1908 (Columbia & London: University of Missouri Press, 1991),115-117; also Joseph D. Ketner and Jane E. Neidhard, A Gallery of Modern Art: at Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Gallery of Art, 1994), 56.
ⁱⁱⁱ Tennyson; Ketner, 56; also Howard Jacobson, Ovid's "Heroides" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 177-193.
^iv Ketner, 56.
^v Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1990), 148-151.

Jodi Kovach
MA 2003