Vinnie Ream

The American sculptor Vinnie Ream (1847-1914) and George Healy met in Rome in the early 1870s when Ream visited Italy to oversee the carving of her full-length statue of Abraham Lincoln for the U.S. Capitol Building. Ream was the first woman, and the youngest artist, ever to receive a congressional commission for the Capitol Rotunda, in part because Lincoln had recently sat for a portrait bust by her when she was only sixteen years old.