Heckscher Museum mounts first museum survey of sculptor Emma Stebbins

"Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History" is on view at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, N.Y.; it is the first museum exhibition devoted to the 19th-century American sculptor best known for the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park and for a portrait bust of the actress Charlotte Cushman.

The show collects works and biographical materials that trace Stebbins’s career and life. Curator Karli Wurzelbacher combined research and acquisition work to assemble sculptures including "Commerce" and "Industry," small figures commissioned by Charles August Heckscher, and borrowed and restored pieces such as "Joseph the Dreamer" and a "Christopher Columbus" from the Belfast Central Library.

Wurzelbacher said, in a phone interview, that Stebbins "has glorified and heroicized this very difficult work and is doing it for the owner of the mine." The exhibition highlights Stebbins’s Rome years and her partnership with Charlotte Cushman, whom she met in Rome in the winter of 1856–57 and with whom she lived in what the pair regarded as a marriage.

The show notes that Stebbins’s Bethesda Fountain, crowned by the "Angel of the Waters," was commissioned during the Civil War, dedicated in 1873 and selected in part because her brother Henry served on the Central Park Board of Commissioners. It also recounts that Stebbins returned to the United States when Cushman was treated for cancer, gave up sculpting to care for Cushman and her mother, and died in 1882 at age 67.

Key Topics

Culture, Emma Stebbins, Heckscher Museum, Bethesda Fountain, Charlotte Cushman, Karli Wurzelbacher