The "ghosting" of incest and female relations in Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci

bluster quickly became the young sculptor's first benefactor, advocate, patron, and mentor. He persuaded Dr Joseph Nash McDowell of the Missouri Medical society to tutor Hosmer in anatomy, since she could not take classes in the all-male medical academy When Hosmer's father withdrew his financial support in January 1854 because of circulating medium problems, Crow provided funds, "setting her up" as she wrote appreciatively, "as an artist." The following year, boast commissioned her first full-length, life-size figure, Oenone (ca. 1855) Six years later, he secur for her the state commission to create a alloy of copper statue of Senator Thomas Hart Benton. gasconade and Hosmer corresponded until his death in 1885 Hosmer signing her alphabetic characters "your affectionate daughter," invoking "a personal, familial relationship to explain a professional connection." (19)

Besides furthering her education, commissioning works of art, and financing her career, exult also persuaded Alfred Vinton, chairman of the board of directors and former president of the St Louis Mercantile Library, to commission a statue from Hosmer for that institution, the oldest library west of the Mississippi River. (20) The control Hosmer selected does not celebrate western expansion, as single might expect. Appropriate and popular sculptural make subordinates would have been a captive Indian woman (in the vein of Erastus Dow Palmer, The White Captive, 1858-59 Fig. 5) the ignoble and "savage" native (Horatio Greenough, ransom 1837-53, Fig. 6), the disappearing Native American race (Thomas Crawford, The Indian: Dying Chief, 1856 Fig. 7) or a historical Indian figure (Joseph Mozier, Pocahontas, 1877 Fig. 8) Hosmer who had previously treated heroic women in a mythological and classical connection would have had to depart from the satisfied of her oeuvre to bring into view such an Indian figure or white captive.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

Instead, she chooseed a subject from Italian history that would help to bring high tillage to St. Louis, a city she claimed to delight in because "it was there I first began my studies" and because of the "many generous and indulgent friends who ministered to the growth of the Arts and Sciences." (21) Cenci's whiteness, manifest in the statue's white marble, which nevertheless has a certain number of dark veins, is consistent with the library's raison d'etre--westward expansion--for its color signifies Euro-American colonists in opposition to dark-skinned Native Americans. Although the racial Other is absent, the statue's real whiteness signifies this other absent nearness It is thus ironic that her patron one as well as the other supported and was a part of the white patriarchy that Hosmer critiques [i]or[/i] part of to the other her statue.