At the photographer’s house: photographic 'performances' of the sculptresses Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis and Vinnie Ream

Abstract

Since Roman sumptuary laws, clothing, especially women’s, has become a matter of the sexual politics in Western patriarchy. In the mid-nineteenth century, the time in which the North American sculptors Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, and Vinnie Ream worked in Rome and the United States of America, the freedom of clothing becomes one of the suffrage movement’s key proclamations, and also the primary motive of the revolutionary image of the New Woman. This phenomenon ran parallel to the industrialization of photography and the success of the photographic portrait as a system of public representation, in the double aspect of self-representation and self-promotion.

In this paper, we aim to explore the promotional strategies used by Hosmer, Lewis, and Ream through the images of their selves. Despite their belonging to the American community in Rome under the protection and patronage of the famous actress Charlotte Cushman, the vital circumstances of each one were so different, that such particularities were transferred in the exhibition of their public image. All of them knew how to take advantage of the interest that the photographs aroused among clients and tourists; an interest at the same level as their works.