William Wetmore Story was one of the leading members of the American expatriate colony in Rome during the second half of the nineteenth century and a major proponent of the second, more naturalistic and detailed phase of neoclassical sculpture. The son of Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, William was trained as a lawyer; after receiving degrees from Harvard College in 1838 and 1840, he practiced law for a few years and wrote several legal textbooks. Upon the death of his father in 1845, he was commissioned to execute a memorial statue, and in preparation he traveled to Italy in 1847 to study sculpture. He became immersed in the artistic and literary community of Rome, becoming an intimate of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. By 1851 he decided to abandon law for art, and in 1856 he settled permanently in Italy. His father’s memorial, 1852 (Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Mass.), was the first of numerous commissions for portrait and memorial statues Story received during his long career. He made statues of Edward Everett, 1867 (Richardson Park, Boston), and Chief Justice John Marshall, 1884 (United States Supreme Court, Washington, D.C.), and busts of English poets, among them Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1861 (example of 1866, Boston Athenaeum).
Story’s international reputation arose from his dramatic, full-length figures of tragic women from history and mythology. He was praised for the accuracy of the narrative details of costume and accessories in these marble statues.
A highly erudite man, Story was also an accomplished poet and essayist and published poems as early as 1842; among his books is Excursions in Art and Letters (1891). Story was a close friend of Henry James, his first biographer, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose stories popularized his early sculptures. Story also wrote a practical canon on the drawing of the human figure, which was published about 1866.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
University of Texas at Austin, Harry E. Ransom Humanities Research Center, William Wetmore Story Papers § William Wetmore Story, Conversations in a Studio, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890) § Mary E. Phillips, Reminiscences of William Wetmore Story, The American Sculptor and Author (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1897), with lists of literary works, statues, and busts § Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 2 vols. (1903; reprint, New York: Kennedy Galleries and Da Capo Press, 1969) § Jan M. Seidler, "A Critical Reappraisal of the Career of William Wetmore Story (1819-1895), American Sculptor and Man of Letters," 2 vols., Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1985, with reprint of Story’s poem "Cleopatra," transcript of "List of Sculpture Compiled by Story for Eliza Allen Starr’s Lecture on Living Artists," bibliography.
