Attributed to (1821-1915)

Jessie White Mario (1832-1906), 1867-68

Carrara marble 72 x 48 cm (28.3 x 19 in)

Provenance Private Collection, UK Sale, William George, Bristol, UK, 7 January 2021, lot 155

An honor to her sex and to Britain’s great name - W. P. Garrison in The Nation, 1906.1

Fig. 1. Jessie White Mario (1832-1906)

Jessie White Mario (1832-1906) was a British writer, revolutionary and philanthropist who dedicated her life to Italian unification. She challenged the limits placed on women’s political participation and subverted 19th-century misogynistic stereotypes, provoking great admiration from both male and female contemporaries. The Italian press knew her as Hurricane Jessie, a

1 As cited E. Adams Daniels, Jessie White Mario: Risorgimento Revolutionary (Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio University Press, 1972), p. 116. testament to her unwavering commitment to the Risorgimento and her fierce passion for social and economic equality.

Born in Gosport, Hampshire, Jessie was the daughter of a successful ship builder. From an early age she had a strong desire to help those less fortunate than her, secretly giving food from her family’s pantry to the hungry.2 Her middle-class upbringing was traditionally religious yet educationally non-conformist, allowing her an excellent education in schools in Reading, Birmingham and London. In 1854, Jessie’s thirst for knowledge took her to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, where she was particularly drawn to the work of thinkers such as J. S. Mill.3 During her time in Paris, she brushed shoulders with radical republicans and exiled Italian nationalists, prompting her life-long engagement with the Risorgimento. Subsequently, Jessie accompanied her friend, Emma Roberts, to Nice in order meet the Italian general and revolutionary, Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882), an encounter that she described as ‘the realization of a life-dream’.4

Jessie openly challenged Victorian ideals of female domesticity. On her return to England, she applied to medical school in order to fulfil her promise to Garibaldi; to treat the wounded on the front lines. However, she was rejected by fourteen schools in London on the grounds of her sex. She wrote, ‘in no single case did I receive either a sensible or logical reply to my question, “Why may not a woman study medicine?”’.5 Whilst she was unsuccessful, her efforts arguably laid the groundwork for a shift in attitude as, ten years later, nine women sat the University of London’s medical examinations for the first time.6

In London, as in Paris, Jessie moved in liberal social circles. Through the Ashurst family, she was introduced to Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872), an Italian politician and revolutionary. Impressed by her passion and dedication, he asked her to embark on a nationwide propaganda tour to encourage popular sympathy among Britons for the Italian Cause. Mazzini did not doubt Jessie’s abilities as a public speaker stating, ‘I dare say she will succeed more than 20 men who would put their strength together’.7

Between 1856 and 1862, her lecture tours took her around the country and across Ocean. A distinguished orator, she captivated her audiences and successfully raised considerable funds, simultaneously undermining sexist notions that women had no place in politics. A journalist from the New York Herald reported that ‘when she spoke of the wrongs of Italy… her brilliant eyes flashed like fire, and the glow of sympathy mounted to her cheek’.8 Whilst lecturing in America, she also spoke out against slavery, re-affirming her position as an advocate for all oppressed peoples. Confronting senators of slave-owning states, she said, ‘I would not dare to ask support in this great country for the oppressed

2 D. Taylor, Jessie White - An Englishwoman at the Court of Garibaldi (2003) 3 F. Falchi, 'Beyond National Borders; ‘Italian’ Patriots United in the Name of Giuseppe Mazzini: Emilie Ashurst, Margaret Fuller and Jessie White Mario', Women's History Review, 24.1 (2014), pp. 23-36 (p. 27) in Taylor & Francis 4 Adams Daniels, Jessie White Mario, p. 8. 5 Adams Daniels, Jessie White Mario, p. 42. 6 University of London, Women’s education pioneers: following in the footsteps of ‘Hurricane Jessie’ (2018) 7 Adams Daniels, Jessie White Mario, p. 51. 8 Adams Daniels, Jessie White Mario, p. 75. Italians without strong faith in the right of every nation, of every race, of every man to his liberty… For whites and blacks, for everyone together’.9

Meanwhile, Jessie was developing an illustrious career as a writer, translator and journalist. In 1857, The Daily News, a paper founded by Charles Dickens a decade earlier, asked Jessie to be their foreign correspondent in Italy, funding a trip to Genoa. Renowned as the first female war correspondent in Italy, historian David Lowenthal described Jessie as a ‘crusading journalist’.10 She was outspoken and flamboyant, often wearing a tricolour ribbon in her flame-red hair. Whilst her eccentricity and radicalism captivated the hearts of the Italians, it also gained the Austrians’ attention and she was jailed in Genoa for four months. During this period, she met her future husband, Alberto Mario (1825-1883), a radical Italian patriot. They were married in London a few months later.

In 1860, when the fighting began in the South of Italy, Jessie went to Garibaldi’s aid, treating the wounded on the front line as a self-taught nurse. As Professor of History Sarah Richardson affirms, ‘Jessie was a woman of action; she wasn’t just a writer’. She was in charge of two field hospitals and would often spend days on the battlefield with the troops. She also assisted in the operating theatre, the only woman in the hospital unit, including at the amputation of the arm of a twelve year old boy (…‘I held him on my lap; he told me afterwards that I cried more than he did, which was quite true’11). Jessie and Garibaldi had an intimate relationship built on mutual admiration and respect and, as such, when he asked her to accompany him in the Franco-Prussian war ten years later, she did not hesitate. Once again, she was a field nurse and a war correspondent, writing for both The Scotsman and The Tribune.

Returning to Italy, Jessie and Alberto spent time in Rome and Florence before settling in Lendinara, a small northern town. She became an archivist, historian and biographer. She produced biographies for both Mazzini and Garibaldi and created a posthumous edition of Alberto’s writings. Whilst Italy celebrated its unification, Jessie caused controversy by exposing the bleak realities of post-Bourbon Neapolitan life in La Miseria di Napoli, an extensive social study of the city’s residents. She descended into the hellish landscape of the Southern sulphur mines, outrageously peopled by an army of slave children and indentured workers: ‘Nothing can compare in any least degree with the human system of child torture openly and consistently practised in all the sulphur mines of the island (of Sicily).’12 As a member of the radical left, Jessie had pushed for genuine reform in order to achieve emancipation for all Italian citizens. The lack of social progress in post-unification Italy disappointed her and she continued to advocate on behalf of those in poverty.

Towards the end of her life, Jessie taught English in a school in Florence. She continued to write extensively, submitting her last of 143 articles to the American publication, The Nation,

9 D. Moore, 'Transnational Nationalists: Cosmopolitan Women, Philanthropy, and Italian State-Building, 1850-1890', City University of New York (2018), pp. 106 10 T. Kington, ' Englishwoman is hailed as a heroine of Italy's unification struggle', The Guardian, 22 May 2011 D. Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conversation (University of Washington Press, 2000), p. 332. 11 Alberto Mario, Garibaldi’s Invisible Bridge, Cornhill Magazine, 9 May 1864; 549 12 Jessie White Mario, article, The Nation, 4 January 1892 in the week before she died in 1906.13 Thousands attended her funeral procession. Her casket was followed by Garibaldian red shirts, schoolgirls, professors and members of the public before she was buried next to Alberto in Lendinara. The Italian government wanted to give Jessie a state funeral. She refused, arguing that the money would be better spent on relieving poverty. An atypical Victorian woman, Jessie has been written out of Britain’s historical narrative. However, her memory lives on in Italy where she is commemorated by plaques in the streets of Florence and Ledinara, with a school named after her in Genoa. Indeed, poet and Nobel Laureate Giouse Carducci asserts that Jessie White Mario 'is a great woman to whom we Italians owe a lot’.14

Rome - Radical City

The city of Rome in the mid-nineteenth century provided a unique environment for the nurturing of women as independent thinkers and artists: women who arrived in Rome from the 1850s discovered ‘a social and cultural space that had traditionally affirmed feminine participation in creative endeavours.’15 It was in Rome that the careers of the two greatest female painters of the 18th century, Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) and Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842), were developed and burnished. Indeed, the Arcadian Academy had been welcoming and encouraging female participants since as early as 1690. Female poets and improvisers, a uniquely Italian form, were celebrated to the extent that in 1776 Corilla Olimpica (1727-1800) became the first woman Poet Laureate of Rome. Her coronation on the Capitoline steps was a widely-lauded celebration of feminine creative genius.

The city therefore, in its liberality and tolerance, became a magnet for educated and often radical women, especially from Britain and America. Rome had already existed as the centre of a cultural and intellectual centrifuge for over a hundred years. The Grand Tour was a paradigm for the educationally sophisticated and socially ambitious. But Rome’s reputation was paradoxical, based on its crumbling Antique past and Roman Catholic mysteries rather than its contemporary pre-eminence. Travellers were often taken aback by the desperately poor Romans. It was to this Rome, idealised and Romanticised, that liberal people flocked. Certainly, its citizens suffered from political tyranny, but before Italy’s national reawakening with the political movement ending in the Risorgimento, the city was uncomfortably hot and provincial and disinterested in the views of its visitors and foreign residents. For those from countries which were increasingly socially conservative, like the and Great Britain, however, Rome remained profoundly alluring. Therefore, it was in Rome that many dynamic but free-thinking people congregated: this included, artists, writers, actors, political radicals and the sexually non-conventional.

Within the artistic world, one of the most formidable groups in Rome was that of American female sculptors. Florence and Rome had long since been the favoured cities of Neoclassical artists. Horatio Greenough (1805-1852), a native, was the first American sculptor to

13 Orlando Project, Jessie White Mario (2021) 14 L. Garland, Women of the Risorgimento (2020) 15 Melissa Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in 19th Century Rome, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014 settle in Italy, in Florence in 1828. Enticed by the irresistible opportunity to study and practise surrounded by such a wealth of art from the Classical and Renaissance periods, American artists flocked to these cosmopolitan hubs, and Rome in particular, throughout the nineteenth century.

It was not only the lure of Italy’s great museums and galleries that drew these expatriates, but the abundant local supply of white marble, their medium of choice, from the quarries of Carrara and Serravezza. As the American journalist and politician, John W. Forney (1817- 1881) observed, ‘The eloquence of marble is something very strange…it seems to talk to you in what I would call the grave silence of its features. It is not so with bronze. But the spotless marble of Carrara…has a language of its own when translated into statuary.’16 More important still, to some artists, was the cheap labour costs of the highly-skilled Italian stone carvers and craftsmen who could be hired to assist in the complex translation of drawings and clay maquettes into enlarged marble works. This collaborative process stretches as far back as Antiquity and was utilised by numerous sculptors in Italy.

In 1903, the writer (1843-1916) famously immortalised the particular group of American women sculptors in Rome by describing ‘…that strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’ who at one time settled upon the seven hills [of Rome] in a white, marmorean flock.’17 The earliest member of this Roman “flock”, was Harriet Goodhue Hosmer (1820-1908). Hosmer was often cited ‘as proof of the possible accomplishments of women in what had been heretofore a man’s world.’18 Originally from Watertown, , Hosmer sailed to Italy in 1852 along with her companion, the famous Boston actress and lecturer, (1816-1876).

16 John W. Forney, A Centennial Commissioner in Europe, 1874-76, J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1876, Philadelphia, p. 115; this extract is referenced in Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Lure of Italy: American artists and the Italian experience 1760-1914, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York, 1992, p. 91. 17 As referenced by Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., et al, in Nineteenth Century American Women Neoclassical Sculptors, exhibition catalogue, Vassar College Art Gallery, Merchants Press, Poughkeepsie, New York, 1972, title page. 18 William H. Gerdts. Jr., ‘Introduction: The White, Marmorean Flock’, in Cikovsky, Jr., et al, in Nineteenth Century American Women Neoclassical Sculptors, p. 3.

Fig. 2. in her Rome studio, at work on the monumental statue of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, 1865

In the case of Hosmer and her contemporaries, the notion of a “flock” was not only metaphorical, but also related physically to the location of this group within Rome. Situated just east of the Vatican City, in an area which had been home to Nicolas Poussin (1594- 1665), Claude Lorrain (c. 1604-1682), and Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) some two hundred years earlier, the Via Margutta and its surrounding streets formed the centre of the women artists’ colony; ‘at No. 5 were to be found Harriet Hosmer and Florence Freeman, and at No. 53A, .’19 The group also included Anne Whitney (1821-1915), (1815-1882) and (1844-1907), the first professional African American female sculptor. All were described as “individualists”, 19th century code for homosexuality, and Rome’s liberality seems to have been a magnet for people who found conformity stifling. Actors, writers, radicals, abolitionists, anarchists and libertines – a whole spectrum of non-conformists gravitated to the city. It was the mutual attraction of each other, the thrill of Revolution and the romance of the Eternal City.

Anne Whitney (1821-1915)

Anne Whitney, thought to be the author of the present work, was the oldest of the sisterhood of sculptors. Born into a prominent family in Watertown, Massachusetts, she was already an established poet when she turned to at the comparatively advanced age of 38, in

19 Ibid. 1859. She studied with William Rimmer (1816-1879) in Boston and her natural ability was profound: as early as 1862 she produced two full-scale male nudes in marble, Youth and the Chaldean Shepherd (both now lost but known from period photographs).

In 1867 she moved to Rome with her partner, the painter Adeline Manning (1862-1906). They were welcomed by Charlotte Cushman’s circle of women artists, writers and reformers, a group which included Jessie White Mario. Of all the sculptors of the group, Whitney was perhaps the most overtly political. She came from a Unitarian family which supported , as well as women’s rights and educational reform. Her Civil War sculpture, Africa, 1864 (now lost), took as its subject the outrage of slavery in America. In 1869 she exhibited a work, Roma (Fig.3.) which portrayed the suffering of the urban poor in the city whilst explicitly criticising the wealth of the Vatican by comparison. The sculpture caused such a sensation in Rome that Whitney had to remove it to the home of the American consul at Florence, for fear of it being confiscated or even destroyed by the Vatican police. Later, in circa 1871, the artist produced another daring political subject, ToussainT L’Overture in Prison (now lost) which showed the Haitian leader who had led a successful slave rebellion, chained after capture by the French, another clear analogy to the Italian political struggle.

Fig. 3. Anne Whitney (1821-1915), Roma, 1869, Bronze, 68.6 x 39.4 x 50.8 cm (27 x 15-1/2 x 20 in), Davis Museum at

As a portrait sculptor Whitney was equally devoted to those interested in political radicalism and reform. Her subjects included abolitionists (1805-1879), (1837-1863) and (1811-1896); the educationalists (1855-1902) and Jennie McGraw Fiske (1840-1881); the suffragists (1839-1898) and (1818-1893), and the sociologist (1802-1876). It is therefore logical that she would be the author of the present bust of Jessie White Mario, who was mixing in the same radical circles in Rome and who would have been a compelling subject for the artist. Jessie was certainly known to both Harriet Hosmer and to Margaret Foley (1827-1877). The latter who lodged in the apartment above Whitney. Both the artist and sitter appear to have been in Rome sometime between 1867 and 1868, after Mario had aided Garibaldi and his wounded troops in Mentana.

Stylistically, the treatment of the hair in the present sculpture, with its pronounced but abbreviated volume and undercut to the neck, is close to other examples by Whitney, including Lady Godiva, Dallas Museum of Art (Fig.4.) and Lotus Eater, in plaster, Newark Museum (Fig.5.). The similarity in the handling of the draperies in the gathered seam in Lady Godiva and the present work, is also significant.

Fig. 4. Anne Whitney (1821-1915), Lady Godiva, c. 1861-64, marble, 170.2 x 71.1 x 61 cm (67 x 28 x 24 in), Dallas Museum of Art

Fig. 5. Anne Whitney (1821-1915), Lotus Eater, 1868, plaster, Newark Museum