Public outcry broke out when the statue of the recently assassinated Abraham Lincoln was unveiled in the United States Capitol Rotunda by its creator: the first female and youngest person awarded a government commission at the age of 19. (A century later an unknown 21-year-old architecture student named Maya Lin strirred controversy over her design for the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial.)
Vinnie Ream, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain and a Stand-off in the U.S. Capitol
It was a cold night in January 1871 when Lavinia Ellen “Vinnie” Ream (later Hoxie, 1847-1914) dropped the curtain to reveal her full-length marble statute of the 16th president she had sketched from life not long before that fateful night at Ford’s Theater. A portrait of Ream completed by G.P. A. Healy around the same time highlights her luxurious tresses and independent spirit that caught the eye of many a Washington mover and shaker, including Union General Tecumseh Sherman, Confederate General Albert Pike and a string of congressmen and senators.[i] Her rise to prominence in turn caught the attention of the aspiring writer Mark Twain, who in 1868 penned a tongue-in-cheek account of her “occupation” of a studio where she fashioned her clay and plaster models under the Capitol dome:
“How Miss Vinnie Ream Got into the Capitol, and Won’t be Turned Out”
This is the shrewdest politician of them all. With a mild talent for sculpture, but with hardly as much claim on the patronage of the Government as even the poorest of the artists that have canvassed and frescoed our beautiful capitol with their curious nightmares at a liberal so-much an acre (they painted by the acre, likely), she has procured from Congress an interminable contract to build a bronze statue of President Lincoln for ten thousand dollars. That is well enough, for she can build statues as well as those other parties can swab frescoes – a remark which cannot by any possibility be tortured into the semblance of a compliment – but that she should succeed in getting hold of and hanging on to a choice chamber in the crowded Capitol, wherein to build Mr. Lincoln, when a tract of ground, four or five times as large as England, together with its tax-paying population of two hundred thousand souls, is trying to get into that Capital, are perfectly aware that they ought to be allowed to enter there and yet cannot succeed, is a very, very, very, very interesting mystery to the subscriber. Really, does it not look a little singular that nine accredited delegates of nine great Territories should be obliged to stand out in the cold, month after month, in order that pretty, and talkative, and winning little Miss Vinnie Ream may have a sumptuously furnished chamber in the Capitol to build her Mr. Lincoln in? I ask this in no spirit of vindictiveness, for I surely bear Miss Vinnie Ream no malice. I just simply ask it as a man and a brother.
His remarks capture something of the intrigues of the Reconstruction-era:
I said she was the shrewdest politician of them all – and verily she is. The Government never gave her permission to bring her mud, her naked, scandalous plaster models, and set up her little shop in the Temple of Liberty and go to building Mr. Lincoln there. No, she just talked pretty, girlish talk to some of those impotent, iron-clad old politicians – Congressmen, of course – and got out her mud and made busts of some of the others; and she kept on in this fashion until she over-mastered them all with her charming little ways, and they told her to go, take a room in the Capitol, build Mr. Lincoln, and be happy…
The various strategies she deployed to outsmart her opponents slowly won over Mark Twain:
But here lately those nine delegates from the Territories have talked so plainly of the discourtesy that is being shown them in having allowed no resting-place in the Capitol, that at last the Congressmen have felt obliged to look around and see what could be done in their behalf. What could they do? Manifestly, since every solitary room in the building was already occupied in a legitimate manner, except for one occupied by Miss Ream, there was nothing left to do but go after that. They little knew their antagonist. They went – and found on the door this notice, just pasted up: “Miss Ream is absent from the city – for two weeks!” by which time the storm will have blown over, the Congressmen will have forgotten it, and the nine delegates become reconciled to the open air, and hopeless of ever getting that storm awakened again. It would take but little to turn my sympathies in favor of the Artful Dodger….
— Mark Twain[ii]
Undeterred by savage criticism she persevered and fashioned a succession of likenesses of well-known men, culminating in her bronze statue of Civil War Admiral David Glasgow Farragut installed in 1881 in Washington’s Farragut Square. Civic monuments in her day seldom portrayed women but Ream created a rare female figures with her Sappho (c. 1870, Smithsonian American Art Museum), the 6th century B.C. Greek poet who was condemned as licentious for dedicating her verses to her female disciples on Lesbos. After a career negotiating the homosocial world of government, Ream tellingly designated a version of Sappho to preside over her grave at Arlington National Cemetery: a fitting celebration of female creativity.
Happy Birthday, Vinnie Ream!
[i] Glenn V Sherwood,Labor of Love: The Life & Art of Vinnie Ream (Hygiene, CO : SunShine Press Publications, 1997) and Edward S. Cooper, Vinnie Ream: An American Sculptor (Chicago, Ill. : Academy Chicago Publishers, 2004) are the standard sources.
[ii]The Chicago Republic February 19, 1868.