For some years Miss Hosmer has been preparing a golden gateway for an art gallery at Ashridge Hall, England, ordered by Earl Brownlow. These gates, seventeen feet high, are covered with bas-reliefs representing the Air, Earth, and Sea. The twelve hours of the night show "Aeolus subduing the Winds," the "Descent of the Zephyrs," "Iris descending with the Dew," "Night rising with the Stars," "The Rising Moon," "The Hour's Sleep," "The Dreams Descend," "The Falling Star," "Phosphor and Hesper," "The Hours Wake," "Aurora Veils the Stars," and "Morning." More than eighty figures are in the nineteen bas-reliefs. Miss Hosmer has done other important works, among them a statue of the beautiful Queen of Naples, who was a frequent visitor to the artist's studio, and several well-known monuments. With her girlish fondness for machinery, she has given much thought to mechanics in these later years, striving to find, like many another, the secret of producing perpetual motion. She spends much of her time now in England. She is still passionately fond of riding, the Empress of Austria, who owns more horses than any woman in the world, declaring "that there was nothing she looked forward to with more interest in Rome, than to see Miss Hosmer ride."
Many of the closing years of the sculptor's long life were spent in Rome, where she had a wide circle of eminent American and English friends, among whom were Hawthorne, Thackeray, George Eliot, and the Brownings. She made several discoveries in her work, one of which was a process of hardening limestone so that it resembled marble. She also wrote both prose and poetry, and would have been successful as an author, if she had not given the bulk of her time to her beloved sculpture.
After her long sojourn in Rome she spent several years in England, executing important commissions, and then turned her face toward America. In Watertown, where she was born, she again made her home; and here she breathed her last, February 21, 1908, after an illness of three weeks. She was in her seventy-eighth year. By her long life of earnest work and self-reliant purpose, coupled with her high gift, she has made for herself an abiding place in the history of art.
Madame de Staël.
It was the twentieth of September, 1881. The sun shone out mild and beautiful upon Lake Geneva, as we sailed up to Coppet. The banks were dotted with lovely homes, half hidden by the foliage, while brilliant flower-beds came close to the water's edge. Snow-covered Mont Blanc looked down upon the restful scene, which seemed as charming as anything in Europe.
We alighted from the boat, and walked up from the landing, between great rows of oaks, horsechestnuts, and sycamores, to the famous home we had come to look upon,--that of Madame de Staël. It is a French chateau, two stories high, drab, with green blinds, surrounding an open square; vines clamber over the gate and the high walls, and lovely flowers blossom everywhere. As you enter, you stand in a long hall, with green curtains, with many busts, the finest of which is that of Monsieur Necker. The next room is the large library, with furniture of blue and white; and the next, hung with old Gobelin tapestry, is the room where Madame Recamier used to sit with Madame de Staël, and look out upon the exquisite scenery, restful even in their troubled lives. Here is the work-table of her whom Macaulay called "the greatest woman of her times," and of whom Byron said, "She is a woman by herself, and has done more than all the rest of them together, intellectually; she ought to have been a man."
Next we enter the drawing-room, with carpet woven in a single piece; the furniture red and white. We stop to look upon the picture of Monsieur Necker, the father, a strong, noble-looking man; of the mother, in white silk dress, with powdered hair, and very beautiful; and De Staël herself, in a brownish yellow dress, with low neck and short sleeves, holding in her hand the branch of flowers, which she always carried, or a leaf, that thus her hands might be employed while she engaged in the conversation that astonished Europe. Here also are the pictures of the Baron, her husband, in white wig and military dress; here her idolized son and daughter, the latter beautiful, with mild, sad face, and dark hair and eyes.