Object of the Month

Longfellow House - Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site has a large museum collection consisting of thousands of objects, many of which are not regularly displayed in the house's furnished exhibit rooms. Every month, an object will be featured on this page, providing a look at an unusual piece from the collection.

 

Pictured here is a marble bust of Frances (Fanny) Elizabeth Appleton. In May 1836, 18-year-old Fanny was in the midst of her family’s Grand Tour of Europe. While in Florence, Italy, she was convinced by her siblings to sit for a portrait with renowned sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini. She recorded the occasion in her journal on May 23, writing “Driving along Mary + Tom besieged me so desperately to have my bust taken that as a matter of disinterestedness I yielded + we drove to Bartolini’s + clinched the matter in a moment. I have no wish for a marble immortalization and 2 hours a day. I sigh to spare from Florence.”

Despite her initial reluctance Fanny came to enjoy her sessions with Bartolini, which lasted for just over a week. She wrote of her time with the sculptor, noting that they discussed politics, literature, and talked of Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been Bartolini’s patron to such an extent that the sculptor had followed Bonaparte when he was exiled to the island of Elba in 1814. Fanny opined that Bartolini’s work “makes me look solemn in clay . . . ” The final marble product was likely made from the original clay model with considerable assistance from the sculptor’s pupils and apprentices, who Fanny mentioned in her final visit to Bartolini’s studio in another journal passage “I was sorry to look my last on the old red chair . . . and the pale lads hammering eternally – for another’s fame.” Those assistants would have worked from a plaster cast of the clay master, and used calipers to transfer measurements of specific features from the plaster to the marble. The plaster cast used to produce this bust still exists, and is now in the collection of the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence.

After Florence, Fanny headed north from Italy for Switzerland, where she would have her first encounter with Henry Longfellow. Henry and Fanny were married in 1843, but it is possible that the bust did not arrive at the Longfellow house until the deaths in 1861 of both Fanny and her father Nathan Appleton, after which many pieces of art were transferred from the Appleton home in Boston to Cambridge. The bust appears in photographs of the parlor of the Longfellow house on Brattle Street, possibly dating back to as early as the late 1860s. Her “marble immortalization” remains there today.

 

Click here to view past Objects of the Month.