In Boston, she and Max befriended two new women: Grace Greenwood, the New York Times’s first female reporter, and an up-and-coming young sculptor named Harriet Hosmer. Hosmer had quickly fallen for Charlotte after seeing her as Romeo, and continued to see her perform as Lady Macbeth, Meg Merrilies, Hamlet, Queen Katharine in Henry VIII, and many others. The quartet called themselves the “Jolly Bachelors,” and, not content merely to dream of artistic freedom, they decided to take the radical step of making a home together in Rome.
Charlotte had flirted with Bohemianism in England, but this would be her first attempt at creating her own artistic community. Artists and writers were flocking to Italy to live luxuriously in inexpensive villas and enjoy more personal and creative freedom than at home. Max imagined herself finishing the translation of George Sand’s La Petite Fadette, which she had only been able to peck away at on tour. Grace had an idea for a novel, and Harriet would immerse herself in studying masterpieces of classical sculpture. It was less clear what Charlotte would do, but she believed she was done with the stage forever. At thirty-three she was independently wealthy and an international celebrity. What she wanted now was a home in Rome with Max and her closest friends around her.
chapter twelve Rome
The buskers’ cries followed Charlotte as she passed under the obelisk in the Piazza del Popolo, the People’s Square. Turning onto the Via del Corso, Rome’s busiest thoroughfare, she passed into the shade of candy-colored buildings that rose on either side. By the time Charlotte and her friends moved there in 1852, Rome had become a popular tourist destination. It was spring, and white, star-shaped blossoms emerged among the glossy leaves of mock orange trees. Music drifted out of open windows as Charlotte walked south, following the sound of water. Ten minutes later she arrived at Bernini’s Fontana della Barcaccia at the foot of the Spanish Steps.
The steps were white and steep as the cliffs at Dover; pausing for breath at the top, one had a view from the muddy Tiber River to the crumbling travertine of the Colosseum. Clouds of swallows wheeled and shrieked like tragedians. Charlotte looked around her, at the streets of her new home. She now lived down the street from the Villa Medici, the former home of the powerful family who bankrolled the Renaissance.
Though she had retired from the stage for the time being, Charlotte continued working behind the scenes, using her fame to find patrons for her friends. She had moved to Rome with Max, Grace, and Harriet, but the community grew as she began to support more women artists, offering them a place to stay in Rome, extending loans, giving gifts, and writing letters on their behalf to her powerful connections. Under her care, the “Jolly Bachelors” flourished.
Growing up in Massachusetts, Harriet Hosmer endured tragedy early in her life. When she was a child, her mother and siblings all died suddenly, leaving her alone with her terrified father. A physician, he was desperate to protect his one remaining child from illness and created a strenuous daily exercise regimen for young Hattie. Dr. Hosmer raised her largely as he would a boy, and she grew up confident and strong. After she beat all the neighborhood boys racing up and down a nearby hill, they renamed it “Mount Hosmer” in her honor. She also showed early promise as an artist, starting with sketching and painting, then moving on to sculpture—which became her passion. Hattie knew that to become a great sculptor she needed to study live anatomy, which meant nude models. But as a woman she was not allowed to enter any of the academies let alone look at naked men and women. Finding the artistic climate of New England stifling, she begged her father to let her move with her new friend Charlotte Cushman to Rome. There, she argued, she could study classical sculpture, join the male artists in sketching from nude models, and be taken more seriously as a sculptor. Dr. Hosmer could not refuse.
Hattie’s sculptures argued eloquently, if silently, for women’s emancipation. Cleverly, she channeled her politics through a mythological lens—tackling classical subjects, as a man would, but with a twist. Her bare-breasted Medusa was captured halfway through her transformation, so that a gorgon’s head sat atop a mortal woman’s body. Her masterwork, however, was a statue of Beatrice Cenci, a character well known to nineteenth-century readers through Percy Bysshe Shelley’s play The Cenci. In the tragic tale, Beatrice’s father, Count Cenci, has his own sons murdered and keeps Beatrice captive, gets her drunk, and tries to convince her to participate in orgies with her own mother. When he tries to rape Beatrice, she kills him, and the very citizens who wished for the count’s death hang her for her crime.
The most famous image of Beatrice to date was a portrait attributed to Guido Reni painted in 1600. It dwells on her weakness, depicting her as a barely adolescent girl wrapped in a bedsheet. Hattie’s Beatrice, on the other hand, is older, more womanly. She lays on a pillow, her bedsheets wrapped around her like a goddess gown. One bare arm trails off the side of her bed, and she cradles a rosary in her hand, her fingers wrapped idly through its strands. Her face is partly obscured as she looks not at the viewer for help (as the woman in the Reni portrait does) but toward contemplation of the rosary. She seems at peace; the muscles, clearly visible in her arms, back, and neck, are relaxed. It is an image not of penitence but of release.
The other friend who joined Charlotte, Max, and Hattie in Rome was
