International Exhibition, London, 1962. Fine Art Institute, Derby Gallery, 625 Broadway, New York, November 1864. Childs and Jenks Art Gallery, Tremont Street, Boston,June 1864 Unknown Gallery, Chicago, 1865.
Literature
"Harriet Hosmer," Cosmopolitan Art Journal 3 (Dec. 1859), pp. 214-17. Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the International Exhibition of 1862 (London, 1862) o.320. "Art: Harriet Hosmer's Zenobia," Atlantic Monthly 15 (Feb.1865), pp. 248-50. "Miss Hosmer's Statue of Zenobia," New. Path. vol.2, April 1865, pp49-53 Cornelia Carr (ed.), Harriet Hosmer, Letters and Memories, John Lane, the Bodley Head: New York, 1915. L. Taft, The History of American Sculpture, New York, 1930, p.209. S. van Rensselaer, Harriet Hosmer, Antiques, October 1963, pp.424-8 J. Withers, Artistic Women and Women Artists, Art Journal vol.35, no.4 1976 pp.330-336. S. Waller, "The Artist, the Writer, and the Queen; Hosmer, Jameson and Zenobia," Womens Art Journal, 1983, vol.4, no.1, pp.21-28. J.S. Kasson, Marble, Queens and Captives, Yae University Press: New Haven and London, 1990, pp.141-65. D. Sherwood, Harriet Hosmer, American Sculpture 1830-1908, Columbia and London, 1991 S. Green, "Harriet Hosmer: Sculpting Women and Men," Gender & History, vol.6, no.1, April 1994, p.10. Sarah E. Kelly, "Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra," Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 30, 1 (2004), pp. 8-9. G. Gopinath, "Harriet Hosmer and the Feminine Sublime," Oxford Art Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, March 2005, pp.61-81.
Provenance
Almon Griswold, New York, acquired in 1864
Notes
Zenobia in Chains is the most important work of the American sculptor Harriet Hosmer's (1830-1908) career. Until recently it was believed that the eight-foot high marble of the Syrian queen had been lost or destroyed. Although other Hosmer sculptures are preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Metropolitian Museum of Art, the rediscovery of this original marble is highly signifigant for understanding the oeuvre of the female sculptor that John Gibson deemed as having "uncommon talent."
Zenobia, the queen of Palmyra (in modern-day Syria), ruled together with her husband, Odenathus, until his death in 276 A.D. when she became queen regent. Zenobia was a fair but firm ruler who extended the boundaries of her state as far as Arabia and Egypt. The Roman emperors Gallienus and Claudius tolerated this encroachment on Roman territories, as they feared the prowess of her army. However, when Aurelian came into power in 270 A.D., he decided to challenge Palmyra's expansion. After two loosing battles, Zenobia was captured and brought to Rome. Hosmer's marble depicts a majestic Zenobia paraded through the streets of the Imperial City by her captor's army. She grasps the chains that bind her in her left hand; her right arm rests defiantly on her side. Her posture is distinguished and regal and her gaze is steadfast as she defiantly strides through the city. Aurelian was so impressed with Zenobia's strength through adversity, he freed her and granted her a villa in Tivoli.
Harriet Hosmer was a remarkable sculptor and woman who defied the 19th-century notions of femininity. She led what was considered at the time to be a bohemian lifestyle. Born in Watertown, Massachusetts, Hosmer knew at the age of 19 that she wanted to be a sculptor. Early on she flouted convention and went to St. Louis to study anatomy at the all-male Washington University Medical School. In 1852 she departed for Rome to study with John Gibson. In Rome she developed close friendships within the Anglo-American community including the Brownings and Nathaniel Hawthorn. Hosmer received many noted commissions, but the Zenobia In Chains was of her own accord. The plaster was completed in 1859 and by 1862 Hosmer was prepared to exhibit the sculpture at the International Exhibition in London. From 1864-6 the marble traveled to Derby's Gallery in New York, Jenk's Gallery in Boston and to Chicago. Hosmer sold the present marble to Almon Griswold of New York in 1864 as well as four copies to Mrs. Potter Palmer of Chicago, Robert W. Emmons of Boston, and Alexander T. Stewart of New York. From old photographs, these versions vary from the original in the articulation of the belt buckle.
There has been much made of Hosmer's choice of subject matter and its feminist and personal implications. Hosmer wrote that she picked Zenobia for "her womanly modesty, her manly courage, and her intellectual tastes." The sculpture does undoubtedly reflect Hosmer's sympathy for women's right, but her response to the bland and submissive depictions of femininity is not only achieved solely through iconography but also through the sculpture's materiality and surface treatment. The present marble is not concerned with verisimilitude; in this arena Hosmer had already proved her prowess (fig. 1). Zenobia in Chains is Hosmer's embodiment of the ideal female form: solid and block like. In following the ideals of the 18th century art-theorist Johann Joachim Winkelmann (1717-1768), Hosmer sought the feminine "sublime" by deliberately not provoking desire and by renouncing any assertions of bias. By Hosmer's interpretation, the denial of movement through transfiguration to stone was the ultimate form of feminine freedom.
Ironically, Hosmer's Zenobia was still met with a traditional response. In Hosmer's own words "a woman artist who has been honored by frequent commissions, is an object of peculiar odium." Although the sculpture itself received the praise of many of her contemporaries and was lauded for its beauty and superiority to the antique, two journals believed it was far too good to have been carved by a woman, "It was so beautiful and exquisite in his heralding of the Grecian ideal that it invoked cries that the marble was not, in fact, by Hosmer, but a work of Gibson or one of her many studio assistants." Hosmer was outraged "I hope and trust that I may soon be involved in a law suit. For seven years it has been whispered about that I do not do my own work but employ a man to do it for me."
Harriet Hosmer was a talented artist and a woman ahead of her time. The Zenobia in the Chains is the apogee of her extraordinary career. The majestic marble is so remarkable in its modeling and the depth of meaning that when complete no one believed a woman could have carved her. Hosmer, however, was as steadfast as her subject, if less stoic, for when a younger woman artist enquired to Hosmer as the first thing a woman artist should learn, Hosmer replied, "learn to be laughed at, and learn as quickly as you can."
