Patience Wright: Marriage

"Patience Lovell Wright" by Robert Edge Pine

 "By 1748, Patience Wright was back home in 'straitened circumstances' and, acceding to custom and necessity, married Joseph Wright, 'a substantial Quaker, who had nothing but Age and Money to recommend himself to her Favour.' They settled down in a house in Bordentown which is still standing. 'This Connection, however, enabled her to buy such materials as she wanted and to pursue the Bent of her Genius; and while the old Gentleman produced her four living Children, she modelled him an hundred in Clay, but not one to his taste.' Mr. Wright evidently disapproved of his wife's messy habit of modeling.

Patience bore a son, Joseph, and three daughters. Her once prosperous husband was now working as a cooper and living in Philadelphia when he died in 1769, leaving behind a peculiar will. He left his small estate to the children but willed her the house in Bordentown on condition that she raise and educate them. Now a forty-four-year-old widow with children to raise, Wright decided to use her lifelong hobby as a means of support. She and her widowed sister, Rachel Wells, who was already modeling portraits in wax, set up a waxworks show and were soon touring the colonies with it, traveling to Boston, Charleston, and other cities.

No ordinary exhibition, it was innovative for its time. While it was considered 'lower-class' than sculpting with bronze or stone, it was cheaper to manufacture and gave the sculptures a more life-like quality. Wright sculpted the hands and the faces of her sitters in wax, created a metal frame, attached the wax appendages, and dressed the wax/metal mannequin in clothes provided by the sitter. These sculptures and busts were life-size and fascinated the local population who visited her waxworks in Philadelphia and New York City. 

After moving to Queen Street in New York City, Wright returned from a business errand one day in 1771 to discover that her children had accidentally set fire to the house, destroying almost all her work. Diligently, the two sisters repaired or replaced the work, which was acclaimed by the 'New York Gazette,' as showing 'superior skill and judgment.'" All of this served to precipitate a significant change in the days to come.

To be continued

(Excerpts from "American Women Sculptors" by Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein and "Patience L. Wright" from a page on the American Battlefield Trust site
.)