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Anne Whitney
(September 2, 1821 - January 23, 1915) USA

Anne Whitney

Sculptor, poet

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Anne Whitney was born in Watertown, Massachusetts. She was the youngest child of Nathaniel Ruggles Whitney, Jr.- a justice of the peace - and Sally, or Sarah, Stone Whitney, both of whom were descendants of Watertown settlers of 1635. She had a sister and five brothers. The family moved to East Cambridge by the time that Whitney was 12 years old and returned to Watertown in 1850.

Her family were Unitarians and abolitionists. They fought for women's and education rights, as well as abolition of slavery. Except the 1834–1835 school year that she attended at a private school run by Mrs. Samuel Little in Bucksport, Maine, she received her education from private tutors. Her year at private school allowed her to teach. Whitney enjoyed writing poetry and had an interest in sculpture.

From 1847 to 1849, she ran a small private school in Salem, Massachusetts, after which she traveled by ship to visit cousins in New Orleans, via Cuba, from December 1850 to May 1851.

She began making portrait busts of family members about 1855. At the time that Whitney began to study art, women had limited educational opportunities. Unlike male students, women could not take life drawing classes. Visits to art galleries required that sculptures of nude men needed to have the genitalia covered before the women could enter the gallery. Plaster casts of the human form could not be used in co-educational classrooms.

Whitney moved to New York so that she could study anatomy at a Brooklyn hospital from 1859 and into 1860 and then studied drawing and modeling at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Whitney was on the front end of the New Woman movement. Rather than following an acceptable path for women in the mid-1850s to explore her interest in poetry, she believed that she could more fully express her viewpoints about social causes through art. In 1859, she published a volume of poetry entitled Poems , which was a collection of her poems that were previously published in magazines.

In 1860, she established a studio in Watertown. Two years later, she rented a studio in Boston. Whitney moved to Rome in 1867. While there, she worked in the city and took long vacations in Europe, including two trips to Munich for further study, including learning foundry techniques for working in bronze. In Rome, she was able to make works using nude male models, where it was not considered improper for a women.

Throughout her adulthood, she was an advocate for forest conservation, women's rights, abolition of slavery, and equal educational opportunities for African-Americans. Whitney was an individualist, who lived independently and cut her hair short, which annoyed her Victorian neighbors. She was active in political, literary and artistic circles and supported liberal activists, sculptors and other artists.

She lived with and shared her life with Abby Adeline Manning (1836–1906), who devoted her life to Whitney. Whitney Manning lived abroad in the 1860s and 1870s, in Rome, Florence, and Paris. They had what was called a "Boston marriage", a term for a long-term relationship between upper-class, educated women, which was generally accepted within the community.

Whitney died on in Boston, Massachusetts, of cancer and was buried in Cambridge at Mount Auburn Cemetery alongside Abby Adeline Manning.

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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