Lander, Louisa (1826–1923)

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Lander, Louisa (1826–1923)

American marble sculptor. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1826; died in Washington, D.C., in 1923.

Born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1826, Louisa Lander was drawn to sculpting at an early age. Working first in Washington, D.C., she had already received a fair number of commissions when, in 1856, she traveled to Rome to become a student-assistant in the studio of Thomas Crawford. There, she became a member of the American artists' colony then thriving in the city and met novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, also a native of Salem, who became intrigued while he sat for her during the sculpting of a bust. He subsequently modeled all the independent women artists in his novel The Marble Faun on Lander, and probed the sculptor's personality and philosophy during their sittings. In his notebooks, Hawthorne described her as "a young woman, living in almost perfect independence, thousands of miles from her New England home, going fearlessly about these mysterious streets by night as well as by day; and no household ties; nor rule or law but that within her; yet acting with quietness and simplicity, and keeping, after all within a homely line of right."

Despite this "keeping … within a homely line of right," at some point during her stay in Rome Lander apparently did, or was thought to have done, something that so scandalized her fellow artists that from then on she was largely ostracized. History does not record the nature of Lander's moral lapse, or whether it was real or imagined, but it was serious enough that a number of the members of the colony conducted a special investigation into the charges against her. Standing tall in the face of widespread gossip (sculptor John Rogers wrote of her at the time, "She snaps her fingers at all of Rome"), Lander refused to admit defeat, although her commissions had dried up completely. Forced to finance her continuing work, she embarked on a major sculpture of Virginia Dare , the first English child born in the New World. Although Virginia Dare disappeared before she was four years old, along with the rest of the "Lost Colony" of Roanoke Island, North Carolina, at the end of the 16th century, Lander's work depicts her as she might have appeared had she survived into adulthood. Completed in 1860, the marble sculpture is of an attractive young woman draped in a fishnet, gazing out to sea with a heron at her feet.

For a good portion of its years, the large-scale Virginia Dare, like its subject, was plagued with misfortune. The vessel transporting the sculpture from Rome to Boston was shipwrecked off the Spanish coast. For two years the statue remained on the ocean floor before Lander hired a salvage firm to raise it. After she cleaned it and repaired all visible damage, Lander arranged for the sculpture to be displayed in Boston, where the exhibition gallery promptly caught fire. Repaired yet again, Virginia Dare was sold to a New York collector; he died before remitting payment. The sculpture was then returned to Lander after the collector's heirs refused to pay for it.

Lander moved to Washington, D.C., her best years behind her, and lived out the remainder of her life in relative obscurity. Failing to persuade the state of North Carolina to buy Virginia Dare for display at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, she nonetheless bequeathed it to the state after her death in 1923. (Although the bust she sculpted of Hawthorne is now in Salem's Essex Institute, much of the other work she produced has been lost.) Her bequest was housed in the state's Hall of History in Raleigh from 1926 to 1938, at which point it began journeying through a number of state offices, basements, and storage areas. In the early 1950s, Virginia Dare was given to the Elizabethan Gardens on Roanoke Island, where it occupies a place of honor close to the spot where the real Virginia Dare is believed to have been born.