New Discoveries

Finding Florence Freeman

As a scholar of Italian Renaissance women and material culture, I am accustomed to not always finding what I want to find, since such an enormous number of objects and documents have been lost in the intervening centuries. When I shifted my focus to my current book project, an examination of the experience of a group of late nineteenth-century women artists who traveled from the United States to Italy, the comparative wealth of information was tremendously exciting. Of course, recreating the lives and work of some of these women still remains a challenge. Diaries, letters, and other documents are scattered, contemporary publications are biased or vague, and much of the art has disappeared into private collections. I keep a list of objects I want to find, hoping they might appear at auction or even at a flea market if I am alert enough to notice. So I was delighted when a reference to one of the objects on my list appeared in my inbox. I received a message from someone who had read an article I published in this journal in 2014, in which I briefly mentioned Boston-born sculptor Florence Freeman (January 14, 1836–August 8, 1883) as one of the many women artists from the United States living and working in Rome.‍[1] My correspondent revealed that his great-great grandmother bought the marble chimneypiece that Freeman sent to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876.

Reading this message was especially thrilling because so little has been published about Freeman’s life and work.‍[2] The only sculpture by her reproduced (albeit infrequently), and the only one in the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System database, is a marble bust of Sandalphon (fig. 1), an archangel popularized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1858 eponymous poem.‍[3] Freeman’s identifiable oeuvre recently doubled with the auction of a small signed marble statuette of a seated putto with a lamb at the base of a horn (fig. 2).‍[4] But contemporary sources also cite a medallion of a Commander Perry,‍[5] busts of a Miss Tracy‍[6] and a Miss Dall, an ideal head or allegory of Piety,‍[7] a life-size Chibiabos from Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,”‍[8] reliefs representing Dante and the seven days of the week, and statuettes of Thekla from Elizabeth Rundle Charles’s Chronicles of the Schönberg-Cotta Family (1862)‍[9] and a sleeping child.‍[10] And, in their book Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works (1879), Clara Erskine Clement and Laurence Hutton described a chimneypiece representing “Children and Yule Log and Fireside Spirits,” displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition and purchased by Boston philanthropist Mary Tileston Hemenway (1820–94).‍[11] Knowing this last reference, I asked my correspondent whether his relative was Hemenway. He confirmed my guess and connected me with the current owner of Hemenway’s Italianate home in Boston’s Beacon Hill, who invited me to examine the chimneypiece—still, to my surprise, in its original location in what was originally the family parlor on the second floor (fig. 3).

Fig. 1, Florence Freeman, Sandalphon, before 1870. Marble. National Park Service, Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, Cambridge. Courtesy of National Park Service, Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

Fig. 2, Florence Freeman, Putto and Lamb, ca. 1870s. Marble. Location unknown. Artwork in the public domain; image available from www.liveauctioneers.com.

Fig. 3, Florence Freeman, Yule Log Chimneypiece, 1876. Marble. Private Collection, Boston. Photograph by the author.

The very fact that Freeman’s known sculpture—a bust, a statuette, and now this chimneypiece—represents such diverse types of objects speaks to her efforts to capture clients in a competitive market and her awareness of the popularity of such domestic ornament among the art-inclined travelers to Rome. The Hemenway chimneypiece is especially interesting in this context. By the late nineteenth century, although stoves were increasingly used to warm parlors and other chambers, concerns about poor air quality and the utilitarian appearance of those stoves kept the better-ventilated and oftentimes visually compelling hearth a focal point in many homes.‍[12] Indeed, it is no coincidence that a popular weekly in the United States addressing household concerns was entitled Hearth and Home (1868–75). With the popularity of Victorian aesthetics, ornamented chimneypieces in marble or other material, purchased at home or abroad, added to the overall décor, even if efforts had to be made to keep them free of dirt from smoke and ash.‍[13] In addition to appealing to late nineteenth-century taste, marble chimneypieces also recalled those seen in Renaissance palaces, which were cited in contemporary guidebooks and served as models for Anglo-American homeowners.‍[14] Even artists who had a wide range of both public and private commissions had no qualms creating chimneypieces, with perhaps the most impressive being the monumental example that Augustus Saint-Gaudens—who lived in Italy for an extended period himself—made for the New York home of Cornelius Vanderbilt II in the early 1880s.‍[15] Mary Hemenway and her husband, the merchant Augustus, were part of Boston’s elite circles, and their home was the setting for a multitude of social events, so Freeman’s chimneypiece, though much less ostentatious than that of Saint-Gaudens, would have been admired by many.

Fig. 4, Detail of Florence Freeman, Yule Log Chimneypiece, 1876. Marble. Private Collection, Boston. Photograph by the author.

It was certainly the focus of Hemenway’s chamber. The hearth, now and perhaps originally, is lined with sheets of stamped metal with a floral pattern to trap the heat and reflect the light from the flames. But few would have noticed that feature; the bright white marble of the chimneypiece, which measures approximately 51 1/2 inches high and 71 1/2 inches wide, was much more compelling. It is constructed of five low-relief white marble blocks surrounded by a reddish-brown brecciated marble mantel and framework, probably carved from rosso mandorlato or portasanta, both of which would have been easily accessible to Freeman in Rome, particularly in the relatively small pieces she required. The mantel is about 15 1/2 inches deep, providing ample space to hold the ornamental objects and bric-a-brac so popular in fashionable homes of this era.‍[16] Below it, the lintel is carved with a playful frieze (fig. 4). On the left, three boys try to yank a leafy branch from the jaws of a shaggy dog. This branch, and the Yule log itself, in the foreground at left center of the lintel, were apparently felled by the ax now resting against a stump at right center. Six nude boys work in pairs to tug the log with a twisted rope from left to right, their tousled curls indicating their movement through space; a butterfly hovering in the background and vegetation provides the minimal setting. The blocks on either side of this frieze are carved with curly haired seraphim with folded wings. Below those, on the blocks surrounding the hearth, are figural groups composed vertically around tree stumps to fit the tall, narrow space. The left has two winged nude putti below a bearded Saint Nicholas who wears a fur-trimmed cap and jacket, with a pipe in his right hand and a toy-filled sack over his left shoulder; the right has three winged nude putti, the topmost playing a string instrument. I was delighted by the inscription “Florence Freeman made this Rome 1876” (FLORENCE FREEMAN FECIT ROMÆ 1876) carved into the left side.

Like other artists in the United States during this period, Freeman had few opportunities to see original works of art, and as a woman she had even fewer opportunities for training. To counter this, she traveled to Italy in 1861, at the age of twenty-five, and remained there, but for periodic visits to family, for the rest of her life. She was one of several women sculptors associated with actress Charlotte Cushman—as lovers, friends, or recipients of financial support—including Margaret Foley, Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, Emma Stebbins, and Anne Whitney.‍[17] Americans were intrigued by women artists abroad in part due to the popularity of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Marble Faun (1860), a novel about artist life in Rome; according to Hosmer, Freeman was allegedly nicknamed Hilda, after Hawthorne’s painter protagonist.‍[18] Of course, some Americans were less interested in art and more interested in critiquing behavior that went against societal expectations, something women sculptors certainly did. This is best exemplified by Henry James’s later description of a “strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’ who at one time settled upon the seven hills in a white, marmorean flock.”‍[19] Yet, even his dismissive reference to these women demonstrates an awareness of both the artists and their art. Freeman is the least known of these women today, but she spent her sculptural career at the very center of Rome’s Anglo-American community and, as I rediscovered the circumstances surrounding her chimneypiece for this article, I became determined to rediscover Freeman herself.

According to a later manuscript of family history written by her sister Susan Freeman Lawrence, Freeman and her siblings romanticized Italy, naming a pond and a hill near their Beacon Hill home the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius.‍[20] Freeman’s parents supported her interest in sculpture—which Freeman claimed was prompted by seeing an exhibition of Hosmer’s work—and by 1855 she was studying with sculptor Richard Saltonstall Greenough and copying a Venus de Milo statuette; an article in The Crayon described her as “a new aspirant for fame.”‍[21] She modeled a small version of Greenough’s life-size sculpture of Benjamin Franklin for Bullfinch’s Court House in Boston, which was said to “[give] evidence of talent of a very high order.”‍[22]

Soon after this, when Greenough returned to Europe, Freeman lost her mentor. But her family knew Charlotte Cushman, who announced her decision to retire from the stage and move to Italy in 1861.‍[23] The timing was fortuitous; according to her sister, their mother “put her under the care of Miss Charlotte Cushman, who . . . was ‘her Roman mother’ for many years . . . her friendship and that of Harriet Hosmer were of great value and pleasure not only to Flori but to us all.”‍[24]

In fact both Cushman and Hosmer would become incredibly important to Freeman. On July 17, 1861, Freeman sailed to Liverpool with Cushman, Cushman’s lover Emma Stebbins and maid Sallie Mercer, and Margaret Foley.‍[25] Although Foley quickly went ahead to Rome, the other women made a more leisurely journey south, stopping, for example, to visit Rosa Bonheur in Fontainebleau before arriving in Florence on September 25.‍[26] Cushman, Stebbins, and Mercer soon departed for Rome, but not before Cushman secured a mentor and lodgings for Freeman in Florence. Cushman wrote to her former lover Emma Crow Cushman, now the wife of her nephew Ned, to reveal, “I saw [sculptor Hiram] Powers + talked to him as though I was Florence’s uncle. He is as kind as [a] man can be + promises that she shall work in his studio or in fact do anything to command him.”‍[27] She also settled Freeman in an apartment with the painter Elisabeth Adams, the sister of Annie Adams Fields. A very satisfied Cushman noted, “[Freeman] is fixed as far as her art + her own personal comfort are concerned. All now depends upon herself.”‍[28]

Working with Powers, and living with Adams, provided Freeman with an introduction to Florence’s vibrant Anglo-American society. But the lure of Rome and Cushman’s homosocial circle of women artists and writers must have been strong. So it is no surprise that both Freeman and Adams moved there by November 1862.‍[29] According to Cushman, they took an apartment with “two other forlorn damsels from Boston,” probably the painters Mary Elizabeth and Abigail Osgood Williams.‍[30] Freeman grew close to the sisters during her years in Rome; they attended services at the American Chapel together and signed the institution’s 1866–67 subscription book one after the other.‍[31]

Many members of Rome’s Anglo-American community, centered around the Piazza di Spagna, attended the American Chapel—a Protestant haven in the otherwise Catholic city—for both religious and social reasons. This community was comprised of long-term residents as well as short-term travelers who stopped for a few days, weeks, or even a whole season; these short-term travelers were especially important for artists like Freeman, since they made a practice of visiting artists’ studios and might be convinced to commission a work or buy something already on display. Cushman’s celebrated weekly salons were another way for her artist friends to meet potential clients, and Cushman was pleased to make introductions and offer assistance. She knew finances were often a concern and believed in providing artists with occasional meals as “a matter of compassion”; in Freeman’s case Cushman’s compassion extended to invitations to carriage drives and an opera performance, and at one point she even arranged for the artist to lodge with Stebbins’s sister and her husband, the painter John Rollin Tilton, in the Palazzo Barberini.‍[32] Cushman seemed to have particular sympathy for Freeman. Paraphrasing Orlando’s description of Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, a role from her own repertoire, she described Freeman as “‘the chaste the inexpressive she’ but she is sweet + good + true—though silent.”‍[33]

However, by the summer of 1864, the shifting relationships among the women in Cushman’s circle caused considerable tension. In another letter Cushman observed, “Hattie has been making use of Florence Freeman as a ‘fag’ but now that [Emma Crow Cushman’s sister] Mary has come she leaves Florie to her own devices. It is hard work to love Hattie for she will not suffer any human being to hold her one moment longer than she pleases.”‍[34] In fact Cushman repeatedly used the term fag, denoting someone tasked with menial chores in an unequal relationship, to imply that Hosmer took advantage of her sister sculptor.‍[35] But Cushman and Hosmer also had their own fraught relationship, and that may have colored her impression of both Hosmer and, on occasion, Freeman too. In May 1864 she escorted Freeman to England to catch a steamer to the United States and described the challenge of traveling “with that ‘inexpressive she’ who drives me almost mad with her silence + non want of comprehension—but seeming want of it + utter inability to make any response to any thought feeling or action. I tried hard to be patient but nearly broke down several times.”‍[36] But it may have been Freeman’s infatuation with Hosmer that upset Cushman more; she continued, “I don’t think Rome has agreed with her—she dont [sic] improve in her art at all—and her infatuation for Hattie—who dont [sic] care for her one bit more than she does for anybody else in the world has made her miserable—she is thin—nervous + almost stupid!!”‍[37]

Fig. 5, Lorenzo Suscipj, Florence Freeman, ca. 1860s. Carte de visite. Athenaeum, Boston. Artwork in the public domain; photograph by the author.

Despite Cushman’s frustration and the personal entanglements of the women in her circle, Rome was the best place for an aspiring sculptor, and Freeman returned after only a few months in the United States. Like other artists, male and female, she worked on her art and socialized with the Anglo-American community in the fall, winter, and spring, and often left the city during the hot summer months.‍[38] Lorenzo Suscipj, who had a popular shop and studio on the via Condotti, took her photograph around this time and she presumably used the resulting carte de visite, showing her with curly hair cut short like Hosmer’s, as a marketing tool for her sculpture, which began to attract notice (fig. 5). Indeed, despite Cushman’s complaint that Freeman’s sculpture showed no improvement, the actress had praised her efforts a few months earlier in January 1864.‍[39] Newspaper reports also began to appear with some regularity on both sides of the Atlantic, and these, as well as guidebooks, directed travelers to Freeman’s studio, which over the years moved around the artists’ quarter between via Margutta and vicolo di San Niccolò da Tolentino.‍[40]

Freeman’s father died in 1869, and related financial worries may have forced her to remain in Rome that summer, with Hosmer and journalist Anne Brewster for company.‍[41] But she soon regained her equilibrium. In January 1870 a group of prominent Bostonians gifted her Sandalphon to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.‍[42] Soon after she was included in a list of “Seven unmarried American ladies . . . practicing sculpture in Rome,” alongside Whitney, Hosmer, Stebbins, Lewis, Ream, and Foley, that was reprinted in several newspapers.‍[43] In fact Freeman continued to profit from her association with her sister artists. An 1873 article grouped Freeman with Hosmer and Foley, praising her growing talent and noting that “Her studio is full of exquisite designs and graceful bas reliefs, statuettes, busts, and statues.”‍[44] Her putto and lamb group may have been one of these statuettes, its horn perhaps intended to hold flowers on a mantelpiece. Relatively inexpensive decorative objects like this were key to success in the art market for many of the Anglo-American artists in Italy; they appealed to travelers looking to purchase a memento of their journey from one of their compatriots. But they also responded to contemporary aesthetics that favored the display of objects and ornaments in myriad combinations throughout a domestic interior.‍[45] Hosmer, for example, had great success producing copies of her marble Puck (1854) to respond to this demand. Of course, those who did not travel abroad or could not afford something on the scale of Hosmer’s Puck might opt for a statuette in Parian or other material that imitated marble, giving a wider range of collectors and consumers a chance to own a version of, for example, Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave (1843). Freeman never achieved fame akin to that of Hosmer or Powers, but her choice of popular subjects and ornamental objects indicate her attention to art market trends.

Regardless of what they created, the novelty of women sculptors, for better or for worse, kept them and their work in the public eye, as did Cushman’s support. However, as Freeman’s career began to attract attention, Cushman fell ill with breast cancer and left Rome for the United States in 1870. Two nights before her departure, Cushman described the many people who called on her to say farewell, including a distressed Freeman, “sitting a silent monument in the easy chair.”‍[46] After so many years of support, Cushman’s departure must have been difficult for Freeman. But others stepped in to promote her even before Cushman left. In one of her syndicated columns earlier that year, Anne Brewster stated that Freeman’s reliefs “of fancy and ideal subjects are poetical in thought, and the designs are exquisite.”‍[47]

Brewster made the first reference to the Hemenway chimneypiece in this column: “Miss Freeman’s designs for chimney-pieces are quite original; one has over the chimney a bas relief of children dragging home the Yule log, and on either side are wood elves sitting on logs as if watching the blazing of the fire pensively and thinking of their lost trees.”‍[48] This praise notwithstanding, Freeman’s design—at this point likely a clay model—was not entirely original; there are thematic and compositional similarities to her friend Hosmer’s unrealized design for a chimneypiece representing The Death of the Dryads (1867) for Melchet Court, the home of her lover, Lady Louisa Ashburton, in Hampshire, England. According to Hosmer, these dryads, or tree spirits, were appropriate because the iconography of a chimneypiece “ought to have something to do with wood or fire,” an opinion she must have shared with Freeman.‍[49] But even if Freeman was inspired in some way by Hosmer’s earlier efforts, her work was compelling enough to continue to attract notice. In 1871, an article in the suffragist journal The Revolution—probably by the editor Laura Curtis Bullard, who was then in Italy—praised several of her sculptures. Without mentioning the Hemenway chimneypiece specifically, it stated, “Her designs for chimney-pieces are gems, and in less prosaic days than these, when people were not satisfied with the work of mechanics, but demanded artistic designs in the commonest household articles, they would have made her famous.”‍[50] Although both Brewster and Bullard refer to chimneypieces, Hemenway’s is the only one by Freeman to be described in any detail in contemporary sources.

These notices continued. A few months later, an article in the Art-Journal described “a clever and well-executed design for a fire-place—children bringing in the Yule-log.”‍[51] And the following spring philanthropist Martha P. Lowe bestowed further praise in the suffragist Woman’s Journal: “Miss Florence Freeman has a charming chimney piece which she is at work upon; it represents the little children drawing in the Yule log, with other pretty fancies; the whole conception of the thing is exceedingly pleasing. I wish some of our rich Bostonians would send her an order for it.”‍[52] Perhaps to entice those Bostonians, and others, Freeman had a chimneypiece, presumably this one, as well as a female bust, photographed by James Anderson’s studio in Rome, which would have provided her with another marketing tool to entice studio visitors to make a purchase.‍[53]

But apparently no one asked Freeman to turn her clay into marble until Mary Tileston Hemenway visited Rome in March 1876, a month after Cushman’s death that February. After so many years of work, Freeman must have been much relieved to sell the chimneypiece.‍[54] She may have known Hemenway from Boston, since both families lived in Beacon Hill. But Hemenway’s arrival in Rome was of interest to all US artists in the city, not least because she was working with Hosmer, Brewster, and the artist and Dante scholar Sarah Freeman Clarke to secure contributions for the Women’s Pavilion at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition, due to open in May 1876.‍[55]

Those contributions included objects by anonymous Roman women—textiles, beads coated with fish scales known as “Roman pearls,” and more—as well as work by Freeman’s friends, Foley, Clarke, Isabella Lane Conolly, and Caroline Carson.‍[56] Hosmer planned to send two sculptures, but she was plagued by logistical difficulties.‍[57] A loyal friend, Freeman sent a letter to the publication of the Women’s Centennial Executive Committee, The New Century for Woman, testifying that Hosmer’s sculptures were delayed but “truly magnificent”; in the end, however, they were not displayed at all.‍[58] Freeman was more fortunate, although her contributions—the chimneypiece and a second bust of Sandalphon—did not arrive in Philadelphia until perhaps August, possibly because she needed time to carve the chimneypiece in marble following Hemenway’s purchase.‍[59] In his review of the exposition, journalist Edward King, though critical of Sandalphon, enthused about the chimneypiece: “Miss Freeman’s Fireside Spirits, as the little sculptures on a beautiful marble mantel are appropriately called, is quite charming. . . . This is good, would we had more of it.”‍[60]

Hemenway may have been too distracted to appreciate this praise of her new acquisition. She sailed home in May but her husband Augustus died in June. She would have been in mourning when the chimneypiece arrived in her Beacon Hill home, after the exposition closed in November 1876, and the installation in her parlor, which would have required assistance from a mason or builder, was most likely delayed as she adjusted to life as a widow.

And Freeman herself was unable to capitalize on her Centennial success. She may have been in declining health; in a letter dated October 1876 she told Hemenway that she had spent the previous summer in Rome suffering from neuralgia and exhaustion.‍[61] In the years to follow, she was increasingly alone; Foley died in 1877, Clarke returned to the United States in 1878, and Hosmer spent much of her time in England with Lady Ashburton. But even from that distance Hosmer continued to depend on Freeman. In 1879 she sent Freeman to meet with the Roman artisan Ludovico Ciccaglia to get him to sign a statement testifying to Hosmer’s invention of a technique to make artificial marble.‍[62] With this, Hosmer was able to defend herself from criticism about her role in this invention—there were competing claims to it—and she made a successful patent application for the technique in the United States.

Freeman fell ill with what was described as consumption in the summer of 1883, and her Roman landlady, Bettina, and an English friend, Ellen Smith, tended to her.‍[63] Smith sent word of Freeman’s condition to English author Mary Howitt, who was summering in the Tyrol. Howitt had herself tended to Foley at the end of her life, and she quickly sent good wishes to her friend:

The news has reached us . . . that you are ill & as I understand confined to your bed . . . If we were near we would both visit you and do what little lay in our power to be of good service. But you are not quite alone—that dear faithful + most kind Miss Ellen Smith is, now, happily in Rome, and it is a comfort for us to know that your padrona, that good Bettina, is faithful to you. I have not seen [Howitt’s daughter] Margaret so afflicted & cast down by any thing for a long time, as she was by the tidings of your illness, which reached us yesterday.‍[64]

But Freeman never read Howitt’s letter; it was written on August 8, the same day she died. Although it was summer, the Misses Williams may have been in Rome with their friend in her final days, because they made a copy of Howitt’s letter and kept it as a memento.

Freeman’s death was reported in Boston newspapers by August 23.‍[65] Since it took approximately two weeks for mail between Rome and Boston, a letter to Freeman’s brother James, dated August 9, probably arrived at the same time. Internal references in this now fragmentary letter identify the author as her Roman banker, James Clinton Hooker, who revealed she died in her sleep.‍[66] Hooker also provided details about Freeman’s finances and confirmed the care she received from Bettina and Smith.

Transporting Freeman’s body across land and sea to the family plot at Mount Auburn cemetery in Cambridge—now on the same path as the plots of Hemenway and Whitney, and only a short walk from those of Cushman and Hosmer, all of whom died in the United States—would have been prohibitively expensive. And, given her long residence abroad, it may not have been Freeman’s wish. Instead, she was interred at Rome’s non-Catholic cemetery at the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, alongside so many other members of the Anglo-American community.‍[67] Hooker allocated 497 francs from Freeman’s account to pay these expenses—the coffin with its mattress, pillow, and nameplate, gravesite preparation, the hearse, and fees for the undertaker and chaplain—and provided her family with a detailed invoice.‍[68] Protestant burial costs were carefully controlled in Catholic Rome, and this invoice, signed by John Trucchi, the undertaker recommended in contemporary guidebooks, accorded with those costs.‍[69]

Fig. 6, Detail of Giuseppe Primoli, Glimpse of the Non-Catholic Cemetery under Snow, March 1891. Aristotype. Archivio Fondazione Primoli, Rome. Courtesy Fondazione Primoli, Rome.

Neither the invoice nor Hooker’s letter described where in the cemetery Freeman was buried, or mentioned a headstone, and her grave is not visible today. However, Freeman died two days after German painter August Riedel, another member of Rome’s artist community, and Nicholas Stanley-Price discovered that Riedel and Freeman were buried side by side in the fifth row of the so-called first zone of the cemetery (fig. 6). Freeman’s family made no arrangement to pay the cemetery fees in perpetuity, so her body was later disinterred, and her headstone removed and probably destroyed, to make way for another burial. Stanley-Price identified part of her headstone in early cemetery photographs, indicating that it was a simple stone slab with a curved top, inscribed with her name, place and date of birth, and place and date of death.

Hooker’s letter also omitted any reference to Freeman’s studio, and I found no advertisement of a sale of its contents, as had happened following Foley’s death.‍[70] Bearing in mind her comments about her health to Hemenway, Freeman may have been too ill to maintain a studio or continue carving in the last years of her life. But the banker noted that “She had two rooms in which there is considerable property a piano among other things” and that Bettina believed some of that property was Hosmer’s, so he planned to write to Hosmer about it. He apparently did, but the letter does not survive; a few months later Hosmer wrote to her friend Cornelia Carr to say that she received Hooker’s letter, but she made no mention of any property; instead, she confessed, “Flory’s death seemed very sad—I had no idea she was in that condition of health so the news came upon me with a great shock. . . . I shall miss her awfully when I go back to Rome.”‍[71]

Despite the great distance, at least some of Freeman’s possessions made it back to her family in Boston. Her brothers later donated eight plaster casts in her name to the Museum of Fine Arts.‍[72] One was a death mask of Beethoven, which I assume was placed near her piano. Two were popular works from the Vatican—a statuette of the Osiris-Antinous (Museo Gregoriano Egizio, ca. 133 CE) and the relief later known as the Gradiva (Museo Chiaramonti, fourth century BCE)‍[73]—and another four were details from Trajan’s Column (ca. 113 CE). The last cast, a bust of an infant looking over its left shoulder, allegedly by the seventeenth-century Flemish sculptor François Duquesnoy, may have been a particular inspiration to Freeman, since both her putto statuette and her Hemenway chimneypiece include cavorting children similar to Duquesnoy’s work.

In many ways, despite their disappearance from the historical record, both the Hemenway chimneypiece and Freeman herself have been hiding in plain sight, the chimneypiece still in the home of its original purchaser and Freeman in the published and unpublished accounts of those who knew or interacted with her in Boston and in the Anglo-American community in Rome. I hope that ongoing examination of additional sources, particularly travelers’ diaries and letters, will yield additional information, and Freeman’s sculpture will continue to appear in private collections or auctions.‍[74] But, even now, Freeman serves as a case study of the ways in which a woman from the United States could take advantage of the art market to have a fulfilling career as an artist, amid a wide circle of friends and colleagues, in late nineteenth-century Rome.