| STOP 3 |
The Public Garden:
Challenge & Change
From Charles Street entrance of the Public Garden (directly across from the entrance to the Boston Common garage) to the corner of Arlington and Boylston
The
first area developed in the Back Bay was the Public Garden. Opened in 1837
as a privately owned botanical garden, it grew into a splendid public park
featuring a lagoon, Swan Boats, and fine sculpture, mostly crafted by men.
Still, many diverse women artists have connections here. Painter Ellen Day
Hale’s father, minister and author Edward Everett Hale, was immortalized
with a statue by the Charles Street entrance. Ellen Hale (1855–1940) fulfilled
the expectations of unmarried women of her time; in addition to her career,
she acted as her father’s hostess. Women sculptors were more often commissioned for garden statuary or fountains than for heroic works like Thomas Ball’s 1869 equestrian George Washington, near the Arlington Street side of the Garden. Bashka Paeff (1893–1979) was a Russian-born Jew who supported her studies by selling tokens in the Park Street subway station. She crafted the charming Boy and Bird Fountain (1934), also near Arlington Street. The statue of abolitionist senator Charles Sumner on the Boylston Street side of the Garden should have been the work of a woman sculptor, but it’s not. Anne Whitney (1821–1915) won the competition, but the Boston Art Committee reneged after learning the artist was female, and selected Thomas Ball instead. Whitney installed her version in Harvard Square in 1902.
| STOP 4 |
The Women’s Educational and Industrial Union:
Art, Society & Charity
Corner of Arlington and Boylston Streets
Women
often supported art through charitable causes. The Women’s Educational and
Industrial Union was created to help working-class women by offering programs
for job training, placement, and protection. Through its fund-raising pageants
and craft sales, the WEIU offered a socially acceptable outlet for some
women artists, a contrast to the commercial venues that men preferred. A
swan has adorned the WEIU since it opened in 1877—the year the Paget family
began running the Swan Boats. Several women artists lived and worked between Arlington and Clarendon streets, including painter Margaret Fitzhugh Browne (1884–1972), wood-carver Molly Coolidge (1881–1962), sculptor Katharine Lane (Weems) (1899–1989), and designer Ethel Reed (1874–ca.1920). Reed, whose studio was at 367 Boylston (now the site of Jos. A. Bank Clothiers), was an illustrator whose innovative designs reflected Japanese prints, Art Nouveau, and Aubrey Beardsley. After 1898, she mysteriously disappeared from public view.