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Louisa Lander (October
8, 1826 – November 14, 1923) was a member of the expatriate community of American women sculptors who settled in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century, led by
Charlotte Cushman and
Harriet Hosmer. Lander was ostracized from this community in 1859 due to a rumored personal scandal, and many of the details of her later life remain unknown.
Maria Louisa Lander was born in 1826 in Salem, Massachusetts, to a privileged New England family. She was the great-granddaughter of Elias Hasket Derby, a wealthy colonial merchant whose fortune had been passed down through the family, and her grandfather on her mother's side, Nathaniel West, was a relative of the famous painter Benjamin West.[1] Her father was a ship captain, and her brother, Col. Frederick W. Lander, explored the American west. Louisa Lander was a cousin of Martha Codman.
She grew up in comfortable circumstances in an Oak Hill mansion in the town of Danvers, just outside Boston. She studied firsthand the carved wooden sculptures by the famed Skillin brothers and Samuel McIntire that decorated her home. Oak Hill was the name given to the estate on Andover Street, Peabody, owned by the Wests. It was built on land inherited by Elizabeth Derby from her father, Elias Hasket Derby. It was arguably the largest and most finely appointed home in the area, with woodwork and mantels designed by McIntire and magnificent murals. The Wests soon divorced (a huge scandal at the time), and upon Elizabeth's death, two large sections of the house were disassembled and moved to Salem where they were incorporated into Nathaniel West's mansion on Chestnut Street. The magnificent Oak Hill became the property of the Rogers family in 1850. The family spent large sums of money on returning the main house to its former splendor. The grounds, totaling about 200 acres, were exquisitely designed to resemble English gardens, complete with lily ponds and tree-lined drives that circled back to Andover Street. Jacob Rogers, who was a partner in the firm of J.P. Morgan, the successor of George Peabody's firm, lived in the house until his death. When his widow, Elizabeth Peabody Rogers, died in 1921, the property was sold to the Xaverian Brothers religious order. The order sold it to Allied Stores in 1955. The house was torn down and the Northshore Shopping Center, now called the Northshore Mall, opened on the site in 1958.
As a young girl, Lander visited Tilden’s Book Shop in Salem, where she viewed expensive works of art commissioned from Boston or New York artists before they were retired to the private domiciles of leading area families. She began her professional career as a cameo carver, producing likenesses of her mother, father, and friends, one of which she exhibited at the Boston Mechanics Association in 1847. By 1855, she had opened a studio in Salem, carving portraits and ideal busts. By all indications, her sculptural career had a successful start. She was only the second woman to exhibit in the Annual Sculpture Exhibition of the Boston Athenaeum, an important institutional patron of the arts, where she showed the marble bust of her father, Edward Lander (now lost), and an Ideal Head of the Water Nymph, Galatea (also lost).
In 1855, at the age of nineteen, Lander went to Rome, where she joined the circle of American women expatriate artists that included Harriet Hosmer, Anne Whitney, Edmonia Lewis, and Emma Stebbins. The community of talented women in Rome included artists whose lives and works have become well known in art-historical circles: Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, Anne Whitney, and Vinnie Ream; and those whose reputations have remained (until now) buried in the historical record: Emma Stebbins, Margaret Foley, Sarah Fisher Ames, and Louisa Lander. In 1903, Henry James immortalized this community of American women sculptors in Rome by characterizing them as “that strange sisterhood of American lady sculptors who at one time settled upon the seven hills [of Rome] in a white marmorean flock.” Hosmer, Lander, Stebbins, and Foley, under the mentorship of the thespian Charlotte Cushman, formed a close-knit and supportive community (though not without personal and professional jealousies) that the author Nathaniel Hawthorne rendered with some sympathy in his romantic account of American artists in Rome, The Marble Faun (1860).
Among Lander's patrons was fellow Salemite Nathaniel Hawthorne, who sat for a portrait bust.[7] Hawthorne was quite taken with her, and Lander became close to the entire Hawthorne family, often accompanying the family or Hawthorne alone on tourist outings around Rome.[8] Critics have made the case that one or both of the two female artists in Hawthorne's work, The Marble Faun (1860), could be based on Louisa Lander, given their relationship.[9] But late in 1858, the relationship between Lander and the Hawthornes soured. In June of that year, Lander made a trip home to Boston to promote her statues of Evangeline and Virginia Dare. When she returned to Rome in November, the Hawthornes refused to see her. During that time, rumors had circulated that Lander had, in her cousin John Rogers' words, "lived on uncommonly good terms with some man here," or that she had posed as a nude model. As a result of these rumors, Lander was ostracized from the American expatriate community in Rome.[10][11]
Louisa Lander dressed like Hosmer. “In her studio,” Hawthorne tells us, she “wears a sort of pea-jacket, buttoned across her breast, and a little foraging-cap, just covering the top of her head.” Like Hosmer, she presented a public persona that was at odds with the ideology of true womanhood. She lived an independent life, residing alone rather than in a female household. Despite this fact, she remained loyal to the women’s community in Rome and maintained close ties with those in Charlotte Cushman’s orbit. Opening her own studio in Rome in 1857, Louisa Lander refused to court domesticity as a protective mantle. As opposed to the homely workplace that Harriet Hosmer cultivated, Lander worked in an unadorned, commercialized space. The building had previously housed Antonio Canova’s studio and currently boasted that of the American sculptor Paul Akers. Off the via del Corso, this little street, now called Via Antonio Canova, was just a few blocks from Hosmer’s studio on via Margutta. Lander’s workplace, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne, was large, high, and dreary, from the want of carpet, furniture, or anything but clay and plaster. A sculptor’s studio (or, at least, this sculptor’s studio) has not the picturesque charm of a painter’s, where there is color, warmth, and cheerfulness. With neither twittering birds nor potted plants, it was an unwelcoming place, devoid of a feminine touch. Two nude female figures stood on display in her new work area: a nearly life-size sculpture of Evangeline (now lost) and a small-scale statuette of Virginia Dare (now lost).
Both Lander and Hosmer chafed under Rome’s strict social codes, but only Lander was forced to evacuate the city due to rumors of moral profligacy. When Louisa Lander arrived in Rome in 1855, she sought out Thomas Crawford as a teacher, as she knew his Orpheus and Cerberus from her many visits to the Boston Athenaeum. Crawford had married Louisa Ward, sister of the poet and reformer Julia Ward Howe, both of whom had attended Margaret Fuller’s famous Conversations in Boston. One of the first works that she produced was the recumbent figure Evangeline (now lost), begun in 1856 under Crawford’s tutelage. Inspired by one of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s most famous poems, she depicted a young woman who traveled south and west in futile search of her lover. Completed in marble in 1858, the sculpture sold to a “wealthy and liberal gentleman in Salem.” When shown in Boston the following year, one critic disparaged the work, complaining that the figure must have suffered terribly from mosquitoes “if she really did sleep on the river’s edge in... scanty drapery.” Despite the challenge to propriety, Lander focused much of her sculptural attention upon the problem of the female nude. Lander completed the full-scale plaster version of Virginia Dare in 1859; the marble was finished in 1860. The sculpture memorialized the first child born in the Lost Colony on Roanoke Island, all of whose settlers had mysteriously vanished in 1587. It was suspected that the infant Virginia Dare and her mother were carried into captivity by Indians. Lander’s Anglo-Indian princess stands proud and tall as she looks out over the distant ocean before her. Her nearly nude body and facial features reveal a classicized idealism. Only once did Nathaniel Hawthorne comment upon the sculptures in Lander’s studio. “Virginia Dare is certainly very beautiful,” he wrote upon one of his first visits to her studio, in February of 1858.
At the end of 1858, Rumor had it that Lander had ventured beyond the pale of appropriate feminine behavior by having an illicit relationship with a man in Rome. The only written record of Lander’s alleged malfeasance was a letter from the sculptor John Rogers, Lander’s first cousin. He arrived in Rome in December and recorded what he knew of the situation, writing several letters home until his departure in February of 1859. In October, when the rumors began circulating, Lander had not yet returned from Boston. Hosmer and Cushman were made aware of the accusations and arrived at the Palazzo Poli , where Nathaniel Hawthorne was living, the following day ostensibly to discuss the slanderous stories. Ten days later, Una Hawthorne fell ill. After sketching on the Palatine Hill, a lovely area that overlooked the Forum, she contracted “Roman fever” and remained gravely ill with malaria for many months. She suffered from high fevers and delirium; her parents feared for her life. Not until May 1859 did she fully recover, shortly before the family vacated Rome. Lander returned to Rome in November and was eager to see her friends. Together with her sister Elizabeth, she called upon the Hawthornes on the evening of November 9; but to their surprise they were not admitted. The following day, she left her card at the Piazza Poli. Again, no response. The following week, she sent more letters to the Hawthornes; December 5 marked her last attempt to communicate with those whom she had once considered friends. In early December, the author met again with Lander’s supporters—Charlotte Cushman, Harriet Hosmer, Emma Stebbins, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—to try to resolve the situation. Unfortunately, the meeting came to naught. Hawthorne was true to his pledge and remained forever silent on the issue. Sophia stood steadfastly with her husband. Rogers reported that Story headed up a tribunal, of sorts, to get to the bottom of the allegations. A number of meetings took place, the last of which occurred the day after Christmas, December 26, to hear testimony for and against Lander in the hopes of clearing her name. Although urged by Hawthorne “to throw her life open to the world,” Lander kept her silence. She refused to dignify the accusations with testimony before the tribunal, led by Lewis Cass, the American consul in Rome. Lander remained in Rome for more than a year following the outbreak of the scandal. In February 1859, she began work on a small-scale statue Undine (now lost), commissioned by an American patron, Mary Warren. The sculpture would be situated within a fountain of Lander’s design for Warren’s Beacon Street home.
On April 1, 1860, Lander returned to Boston, where she was well received by critics, patrons, and the general public. Never losing her pluck, she immediately set to work in her Tremont Street studio. In 1861, she exhibited the statuettes Undine and Evangeline at the Williams and Everetts Gallery; at the Boston Athenaeum she displayed a new work, America Defending Her Children. In March of 1861, she exhibited a large-scale marble version of Virginia Dare in Boston. Despite her professional success in Boston, she volunteered for the war effort in May of 1861. Along with other reformist women, like the author Louisa May Alcott and the sculptor Sarah Fisher Ames, she moved to Washington, D.C., where she administered to wounded soldiers in local hospitals. Hosmer continued to follow Lander’s career in the United States, where she would open her own studio in Washington, D.C., and pursue a sculptural career.
For the last 20 years of her life, Lander lived in Washington, DC, and summered at Beach Bluff. Because of her age, the last summer she did not return to Washington but made her residence on Beacon Street, Boston, where she was later stricken ill with pneumonia and died at 98 years old.
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