Ann Whitney (1821 - 1915). Anne Whitney was an American sculptor and poet. She made full-length and bust sculptures of prominent political and historical figures, and her works are in major museums in the United States. She received prestigious commissions for monuments. Two statues of Samuel Adams were made by Whitney and are located in Washington, D.C.'s National Statuary Hall Collection and in front of Faneuil Hall in Boston. She also created two monuments to Leif Erikson. She made works that explored her liberal views regarding abolition, women's rights, and other social issues. Many prominent and historical men and women are depicted in her sculptures, like Harriet Beecher Stowe. She portrayed women who lived ground-breaking lives as suffragists, professional artists, and non-traditional positions for women at the time, like noted economist and Wellesley College president Alice Freeman Palmer. Throughout her adult life, she lived an unconventional, independent life and had a lifelong relationship with fellow artist, Abby Adeline Manning, with whom she lived and traveled to Europe. Anne Whitney was born in Watertown, Massachusetts, on September 2, 1821. She was the youngest child of Nathaniel Ruggles Whitney, Jr., a justice of the peace, and Sally, or Sarah, Stone Whitney, both of whom were descendants of Watertown settlers of 1635. She had a sister and five brothers. The family moved to East Cambridge by the time that Whitney was 12 years old and returned to Watertown in 1850. Her family were Unitarians and abolitionists. They fought for women's and education rights, as well as abolition of slavery. Except the 1834-1835 school year that she attended at a private school run by Mrs. Samuel Little in Bucksport, Maine, she received her education from private tutors. Her year at private school allowed her to teach. Whitney enjoyed writing poetry and had an interest in sculpture. From 1847 to 1849, she ran a small private school in Salem, Massachusetts, after which she traveled by ship to visit cousins in New Orleans, via Cuba, from December 1850 to May 1851. She began making portrait busts of family members in about 1855. At the time that Whitney began to study art, women had limited educational opportunities. Unlike male students, women could not take life drawing classes. Visits to art galleries required that sculptures of nude men needed to have the genitalia covered before the women could enter the gallery. Plaster casts of the human form could not be used in co-educational classrooms. Whitney moved to New York so that she could study anatomy at a Brooklyn hospital from 1859 and into 1860, and then studied drawing and modeling at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Whitney was on the front end of the New Woman movement. Rather than following an acceptable path for women in the mid-1850s to explore her interest in poetry, she believed that she could more fully express her viewpoints about social causes through art. She made Laura Brown of bust of a girl and exhibited the National Academy of Design in New York. It is now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 1859, she published a volume of poetry entitled Poems, which was a collection of her poems that were previously published in magazines, like Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine, and newspapers. North American Review said of her poetry, Every word strikes home; every line is clean, distinct as if cut in stone; the pen in her hands becomes so like the sculptor's chisel that one questions if poetry be the fittest exponent of her genius.