Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

Working in Boston at the height of the Civil War, sculptor Edmonia Lewis leveraged her talent to advance the antislavery cause. Her success within Boston’s abolitionist circles enabled her to move to Rome in 1865, where she joined a sisterhood of American female sculptors who found freedom abroad from the constraints of gender and race back home. While in Rome, Lewis produced this bust of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), a fervent Bostonian abolitionist whose work she greatly admired. Lewis endowed Longfellow with considerable gravitas, emphasizing his voluminous beard and furrowed brow. Her classical treatment of the poet suggests a desire to elevate American culture as the nation reasserted itself on the world stage after years of bloody conflict. For her part, Lewis distinguished herself as one of the first female artists, and certainly the first artist of African American, Haitian, and Ojibwe heritage, to garner international acclaim.