1. Louisa Lander 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.
11 Facts About Louisa Lander
1. 2.
Louisa Lander was born in 1826 in Salem, Massachusetts, to a privileged New England family.
3.
Louisa Lander was the great-granddaughter of Elias Hasket Derby, and her grandfather on her mother's side was a relative of the painter Benjamin West.
4.
Louisa Lander's father was a ship captain, and her brother, Col.
5.
Louisa Lander began carving and modeling in wood, alabaster, and sealing wax, and worked professionally as a cameo carver in her early career.
6.
Louisa Lander's Dare is in the tradition of the captivity narrative, a genre in American art and literature of the nineteenth century that depicted white Euro-American women as the captives of Native Americans or other non-white populations.
7.
Louisa Lander completed the plaster version of Virginia Dare in 1859 and the marble in 1860.
8.
Hawthorne was quite taken with her, and Louisa Lander became close to the entire Hawthorne family, often accompanying the family or Hawthorne alone on tourist outings around Rome.
9.
Critics have made the case that one or both of the two female artists in Hawthorne's work, The Marble Faun, could be based on Louisa Lander, given their relationship.
10.
Louisa Lander returned to Boston on April 1,1860, and took a studio on Tremont Street.
11.
Louisa Lander was warmly received by the Boston art world, and she was able to recuperate her damaged career.