“Margaret Foley, a born carpenter and inventor, set to work and made us all sorts of capital contrivances.” She spent several summers at Meran, a residence for invalids, celebrated for its grape-cure. In 1877 she was taken with a stroke of paralysis, the root of the malady being an affection of the spinal cord, was carried from Rome to Meran, and after several months of great suffering she died there, Dec. 7, 1877.
During her illness, says Mrs. Howitt, her physician “ordered us to write to any near friends or relatives she might have, and that, if she had any affairs to settle, it might be done; but dear Peggy had made her will, and we were among her nearest friends.”
The friendship of the Howitts for Margaret Foley was very warm and tender; and she found in their true hearts and in their home that rest and refreshment her loving spirit craved, and that true sympathy for her work which is so necessary for the struggling artist.
I first saw Miss Foley in Rome while I was there with my husband in 1874. We had sent her a letter of introduction from Lucy Larcom with a note, and were invited to take tea with her at 53 Via Margutta, her home. She received us in a most cordial New England manner; we were to have visited her studio the next day, but the sudden illness prevented, and we never saw her again. She was then at work on her “Fountain,” and spoke of the figures around it as “my children.”
In personal appearance she was very attractive. Of a medium-sized, lithe figure, with small, unusually strong hands, a high, broad forehead, which, in connection with her refined features, gave her the stamp of intellectual power, a luxuriant quantity of soft brown hair, the longest and thickest I ever saw, merry blue eyes, and a head as classic and a skin as white as her own beautiful marbles.
Miss Foley’s principal sculptures may be classified in the following order: Among her medallions are Theodore Parker, Charles Sumner, Longfellow, Bryant, William and Mary Howitt, Mrs. S. C. Hall, and perhaps others, said to be “full of purity and grace.”
Her ideal productions are Jeremiah, a colossal bust; Pasquiccia; The Fountain; The Young Trumpeter; The Timid Bather; Excelsior; The Head of Joshua; Little Orpheus; Cleopatra; Viola; The Flower Girl; Boy and Cid, a life-sized group; The Baby Piper (Little Pan); and doubtless many others which have not come to my notice.
No adequate biography has yet been written of Miss Foley, although it is said that the daughter of Mary Howitt has contemplated such a work. This would certainly be of value, not only as showing how exceptional talent, (if not actual genius), can assert itself in spite of all limitations, but also as a tribute to a rare and aerial personality.
LYDIA S. HALL.
This writer was the poet, par excellence, of the early volumes of The Offering; as Lucy Larcom said, “She was regarded as one of the best writers of verse while I was in Lowell.”