Harriet Hosmer was born in 1830 in Watertown, Massachusetts, and became one of the most celebrated sculptors of the 19th century, a distinction that is astonishing given how aggressively the art establishment tried to keep women out. She studied anatomy at a time when every American medical school refused to admit women, eventually gaining access through a personal appeal to a university in Missouri. Then she moved to Rome at age 22, because Rome would give her what America wouldn't: studio space, professional mentorship, and freedom from the conventions that followed her everywhere at home.

In Rome, she built an international career. She was commissioned by American presidents, European royalty, and collectors across the Atlantic. Her sculptural style was celebrated for its technical mastery and its emotional complexity. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who visited her studio, wrote about her with a mixture of admiration and visible discomfort at how fully she refused to be the kind of woman he expected to find.

She never married. She wore her hair short, dressed practically, and moved through the world with a directness that her contemporaries found remarkable and occasionally alarming. She formed deep, passionate bonds with women, most centrally with the actress Charlotte Cushman, in what scholars now recognize as part of a rich and vibrant queer community among women artists in 19th-century Rome. Her circle was sometimes called "the jolly bachelors."