New York artist Patricia Cronin is currently working and living in Rome. While in the Eterna, Cronin is spending her time exploring the life and the artistic works of Harriet Hosmer, a 19th-century American sculptor who moved to Rome in the 1850s, when she was just 22 years old. In the course of her highly successful career, Hosmer became known as the first professional woman sculptor: she was critically acclaimed and her works were widely exhibited. Despite all this, Hosmer’s stunning Neoclassical marble sculptures are largely unknown.
Cronin has vowed to change that situation and has spent the past nine months working on the Harriet Hosmer Catalogue Raisonne. Being an acclaimed artist herself, Patricia wasn’t content to produce a photographic catalog of Hosmer’s work. Rather, she’s chosen to represent her Neoclassical colleague’s marble sculptures with a series of monochromatic watercolors. The results are stunning - Cronin’s watercolors showcase the luminosity of marble while giving a sense of the weight and the volume of each of Hosmer’s stone figures.
The creation of a Catalogue Raisonne for Harriet Hosmer is a laudable task that will help to close the gender gap that currently characterizes our understanding of American Neoclassical sculptors working in Rome. Furthermore, Cronin’s self-assigned task of recording each and every one of Hosmer’s works with her own hands presents a particularly interesting challenge: The Queen of Naples, a life-size marble sculpture that contemporaries considered to be Hosmer’s crowning achievement, is missing. Only written descriptions of the work remain and so Cronin has spent months grappling with the problem of how to paint what she cannot see. The solution she’s settled on is that of representing the missing sculpture as a series of haunting apparitions whose forms can barely be discerned. It’s a brilliant move. The technique makes Cronin’s Queen of Naples paintings utterly compelling for they force the viewer to contemplate the transitory nature of all things - even (or especially) marble sculptures which usually seem so very permanent and unchangeable.
How did a contemporary American artist become interested in the work of a Neoclassical sculptor like Harriet Hosmer? Thoughts of life, death, and change over time brought Cronin and Hosmer together. In 2002, Patricia unveiled a 3-ton marble mortuary sculpture that she made to mark the grave in which she and her partner Deborah Kass will someday be laid to rest. Called Memorial to a Marriage, the widely-celebrated sculpture is carved of Carrara marble in the manner of a 19th century sepulcher. Therein lies the moment at which Cronin was introduced to Hosmer. And one can only imagine that it must have been love at first sight, for despite the boundaries of space and time that separate them, Cronin and Hosmer are a perfect match.
Patricia Cronin is represented by the Claire Oliver Gallery in New York. Through July her work can be seen by appointment at the American Academy in Rome: 06 581 2674.
