The window on the top of this building marked the studio for two decades of sculptor Anne Whitney (1821-1915), who was part of a group of American women sculptors gathering around actress Charlotte Cushman (1816-76) in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1873, soon after Whitney returned to Boston, she received a commission for the statue of Sam Adams now standing outside Faneuil Hall.
Her statue of Leif Eriksson is on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall. Her bust of Lucy Stone is in the Boston Public Library, her sculpture of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison is in the Massachusetts Historical Society and her sculpture of Charles Sumner is in Harvard Square, Cambridge. Whitney had a “Boston marriage” with her longtime partner Adeline Manning. During the late Victorian era, such marriages between women, generally professional and upper class, were both common and accepted by society at large.
