Patience Wright: America's First Professional Sculptor

Framed wax bust of Washington, circa 1864,
by Patience Wright

"Patience Wright (1725-1786), considered by many to be America's first professional sculptor, was so highly regarded that the following lines about her were part of an epic poem by Joel Barlow dedicated to the new nation:

'See Wright's fair hands the livelier fire control,
In waxen forms she breathes impassion'd soul...
Grief, rage and fear beneath her fingers start,
Roll the wild eye and pour the bursting heart.'

Freely associating with men of power, demanding a role in the artistic, social and political structure, an expert at publicity and self-promotion, she made her way by sheer force of personality as well as exceptional talent. 

Born in Oyster Bay, Long Island, the fifth daughter of a prosperous Quaker farmer, John Lovell and his wife, Patience, she moved to Bordentown, New Jersey, with them when she was four. Lovell raised ten daughters and one son in accordance with the rather extreme religious principles of an obscure theologian, Thomas Tryon. A vegetarian who was opposed to the taking of animal life (the Lovells wore wooden shoes rather than leather), he insisted that the girls go veiled to protect them from defilement and that they dress in white clothing from head to toe as a symbol of 'temperance and innocency.'

According to Patience, it was in response to this color-drained and sensually repressed early experience that she and her sisters rebelled by secretly engaging in bouts of colorful painting, using natural pigments such as berry juice. and despite her community's injunction against 'graven images.' Patience began to model small figures from bread dough and local clay at an early age.

Her family, however, was not devoid of links with the art world. One of her Oyster Bay cousins became an outstanding colonial portrait painter and may have been her escort when, in 1745 at the age of twenty, she 'became a little disobedient' and ran away from her strict family to Philadelphia in order to see the dazzling works of art she had heard existed in that city. It was also there that she tasted meat for the first time."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "American Women Sculptors" by Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein.)