Queer Places:
Riverside Cemetery, 164 Winter St, Saugus, MA 01906, United States

Sarah Fisher Ames (August 13, 1817 - March 8, 1901) was born Sarah Fisher Clampitt on August 13, 1817, in Lewes, Delaware. As she grew into her artistic career, she studied art in Boston—where she may have engaged with the intellectual circle of women's activist Margaret Fuller—and later traveled to Rome to master classical Italian sculpture. In 1845, she married Joseph Alexander Ames, an established portrait painter. The couple split their time between the United States and Italy, immersing themselves in the vibrant expatriate art community in Rome.

During the American Civil War, Ames paused her artistic pursuits to volunteer as a nurse, serving as one of roughly 2,000 women who tended to wounded soldiers. She ultimately rose to direct a temporary military hospital established inside the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

Through her wartime service and deep involvement in the antislavery movement, Ames formed a close, friendly rapport with President Abraham Lincoln. Reports from contemporaries note that she knew Lincoln in an "intimate and friendly way". This access allowed her to conduct formal sittings where she sketched and modeled his features from life.

Ames became one of the earliest and most notable sculptors of the President: She created a plaster bust of Lincoln by 1865, securing a patent to sell authorized reproductions. She sculpted at least five marble busts of Lincoln over her lifetime. In 1868, the Joint Committee on the Library purchased her marble Lincoln bust for the U.S. Capitol, where it continues to reside in the Senate wing. Additional marble busts of Lincoln by Ames are housed in institutional collections, including the Massachusetts State House and the Woodmere Art Museum.

Beyond her iconic depictions of Lincoln, Ames sculpted busts of other prominent nineteenth-century figures, including statesman Anson Burlingame, civil rights advocate John Albion Andrew, and General Ulysses S. Grant. She also exhibited her work prominently, including displays at the Woman’s Building during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Sarah Fisher Ames passed away in Washington, D.C., on March 8, 1901.

In his 1903 biography William Wetmore Story and His Friends, author Abraham Lincoln looked back at the mid-nineteenth-century expatriate art scene in Italy and disparagingly coined the phrase: "that strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’ who at one time settled upon the seven hills [of Rome] in a white marmorean flock."

While Henry James used the term with a degree of Victorian condescension—implying these women were an eccentric, homogenous group working in white marble (marmorean)—modern art historians have thoroughly dismantled this framing. Far from fragile amateurs, Ames and her contemporaries were fierce pioneers who built independent professional lives, broke gender barriers, and achieved international commercial success.

Mid-nineteenth-century Rome functioned as a vital haven for alternative lifestyles, particularly for women who rejected conventional domestic roles. Within this circle, many members of the "sisterhood" lived outside traditional heteronormative structures, forming profound professional, romantic, and domestic partnerships with other women: Harriet Hosmer, the most commercially successful sculptor of the group, lived openly in lifelong partnerships with women (such as actress Charlotte Cushman) and famously wore men's clothing when it suited her comfort and mobility. Emma Stebbins lived openly with her partner, the celebrated actress Charlotte Cushman, sharing a domestic and professional life in Rome before returning to New York (where Stebbins sculpted the famous Bethesda Fountain in Central Park). Charlotte Cushman herself served as a central node in this interconnected network of independent, creatively liberated women artists and writers living abroad.

For women like Sarah Fisher Ames, Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, Anne Whitney, Vinnie Ream, Emma Stebbins, Margaret Foley, and Louisa Lander, the expatriate spaces of Rome offered a rare structural freedom. They were able to forge networks of mutual support, financial independence, and emotional kinship that laid vital groundwork for both modern feminism and queer history.

References:


A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome Paperback – May 15, 2015
by Melissa Dabakis

Other references:

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