A Biographer's Blog

The height of Harriet Hosmer’s career was in the 1850s and ’60s, before she turned 40.  Her decline in popularity in later years came about for a variety of reasons, including changing American tastes after the Civil War, changes in Rome after Italian unification, and the attention Hosmer devoted to her relationship with Louisa, Lady Ashburton.  But another reason was that Hosmer turned much of her creative energy to her attempts to create a perpetual motion machine.  She was not alone in the endeavor–many other people were attempting to the same thing.  But Hosmer spent decades on this project, eventually proclaiming, ” I would rather have my fame rest upon the discovery of perpetual motion than upon my achievement in art.” Some of her friends were less than enthusiastic; the Irish reformer and author Frances Power Cobbe bemoaned the fact that “She was lured away from sculpture by some invention of her own of a mechanical kind over which many years of her life have been lost.”

One of my happiest moments as a researcher came when I found the drawings of the invention Hosmer had submitted to the British Patent Office at the New York Public Library’s Science and Industry branch. I had gone in the hopes of learning how I would go about contacting the British Patent Office to begin a search.  But I lucked into asking a very knowledgeable, very helpful librarian, who knew the library held the patent office’s Official Journal, which includes the descriptions and illustrations submitted with patents.  It took him a while to find them, as they had been miscataloged, but he finally dug out the volumes I needed, which clearly no one had looked at in decades.  They were covered with dust.  While I had read her descriptions of the machine, it was amazing to see illustrations of them. I couldn’t believe the information was right here in the New York.

The patent below is the one she submitted in 1881.

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On March 27 at 2:o0 PM, I will giving the Women’s History Month talk at the Larchmont Historical Society. (It is free to members and $5 for non-members) I’m particularly excited about this as Larchmont is home to Hosmer’s fountain The Mermaid’s Cradle.  Louisa, Lady Ashburton, first ordered this fountain for her garden in  her home, Melchet Court, located in Hampshire, England.  Ashburton was Hosmer’s great love, who she referred to as her wife or her “sposa,” and she was also an important patron for the artist. I believe the face of the mermaid is meant to be a portrait of Asbhurton, and the fountain, in which a mermaid holds her infant in her tail, is a tribute to Ashburton’s fierce love for her daughter, Maysie.  Helena Flint, whose father had helped establish Larchmont as a summer colony, saw the work while visiting Hosmer’s studio in Rome.  Larchmont had recently incorporated into a village, and Flint thought the fountain would be the perfect centerpiece for the village park.   The village in fact redesigned the park and renamed it Fountain Square.  Hosmer’s work became a symbol of the town and was often featured on postcards.  A few years ago, I purchased one on E-Bay.  Below see a slideshow of the postcard, some snaps I took of the fountain when I visited a few years ago, and a portrait of Ashburton.

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