Funding Source: American Philosophical Society/British Academy Fellowship (2014); Friends of the Princeton University Library ( 2014); Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (2018); Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library (2018) – In the late nineteenth century regular and affordable steamships and railways brought Americans to and around Europe in growing numbers. Many of these travelers were aspiring women artists seeking the training and contact with original works of art that they could not receive at home. They naturally gravitated to Rome, where Henry James evocatively but dismissively characterized some of them as a “strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’ who at one time settled upon the seven hills in a white, marmorean flock.”

The poet and sculptor Anne Whitney (1821-1915) was part of this group. She and her companion, the painter Addy Manning (1836-1906), lived abroad from 1867-71 and 1875-76, primarily in Rome but also in Florence and for several months each summer in more temperate locales. Their lives abroad, as revealed in the art and other objects they created, admired, and acquired, and in the more than three hundred letters they wrote to and received from family and friends, form the framework for my study. But my research also examines contemporary newspapers as well as the letters and diaries of other sculptors, painters, authors, patrons, and travelers, both female and male, held in archives and institutions here and abroad. These primary sources demonstrate that Whitney’s experience abroad was not unique, though her detailed documentation of it was extremely unusual, and they provide me with a way to construct a vivid narrative of American experience in Italy. I look at what these women made, saw, wrote, bought, sold, and lived with while abroad and on their return to the United States. As the first American women to live in Italy and learn from its art and history, their lives abroad gave them a perspective they would not have had otherwise, and their experiences make them much more interesting than the anonymous flock described by Henry James.