| STOP 1 |
Park Square:
The Early Years
Park Square at Boylston Street
Boston’s
early women artists, like their male colleagues, worked in Park Square and
adjacent stretches of Tremont and Boylston streets, once the center of the
city’s art world. Here in 1868 Boston’s leading painter, William Morris
Hunt (1824–1879), began teaching classes for women in the Studio Building
(1864) on the corner of Boylston Street and Park Square. Despite criticism
from those who thought he was wasting his time, Hunt offered his female
students technical skills, inspiration, and a sense of self-worth. His efforts
lived on through his pupil Helen Knowlton (1832–1918), who used his methods
in her own classes for many years. Hunt empowered these early women artists,
but Knowlton maintained their circle of support and friendship. Also in Park Square is Thomas Ball’s Emancipation Group (1877), probably his most famous sculpture.
| STOP 2 |
Lily Glass Works:
Women in Multiple Media
184–320 Boylston Street
This
strip of land, now dominated by the Four Seasons and Heritage on the Garden,
was once an unbroken row of houses that included residences, a hotel, offices,
shops, and studios. During the 1890s, women dressmakers, milliners, physicians,
teachers, and artists all worked here. The multi-talented Sarah Wyman Whitman
(1842–1904) opened a studio, Lily Glass Works, at 184 Boylston, producing
fine stained glass for Boston’s Trinity Church and Harvard’s Memorial Hall
in Cambridge. She also painted landscapes, still lifes, and portraits, and
designed elegant book covers for publisher Houghton Mifflin. Pictorialist
photographer Alice Austin (1859–1943), painter Lilla Cabot Perry (1848–1933),
bookbinder Mary Sears (1880–1938), silversmith Elizabeth Copeland (1866–1957),
and miniature and pastel painter Laura Coombs Hills (1859–1952) also worked
in this block.