b. 1847, Madison, Wisconsin
d. 1914, Washington, D.C.

In 1866, at the age of eighteen, Vinnie Ream was selected by the U.S. Congress to sculpt a memorial statue of President Abraham Lincoln. This made her the first female artist commissioned to create a work of art for the United States government. Ream had previously shown her ability to depict the president in a bust that she created from life in Washington. Her selection, however, was accompanied by controversy because she was young, female, and had friendships with members of Congress. Despite the objections, Ream was given the commission and the statue of Lincoln was unveiled in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol in 1871. Ream would later create sculptures of Samuel Jordan Kirkwood and Sequoya for the National Statuary Hall Collection.

At an early age, Ream showed artistic interests and talents, which she explored as a student at the Academy, a division of the Christian College of Columbia, Missouri. During the Civil War, Ream’s family settled in Washington, D.C., and she studied with sculptor Clark Mills in his studio at the Capitol. Later, in Europe for the carving of the statue of Lincoln, Ream took the opportunity to study in Rome with Luigi Majoli and in Paris with Léon Bonnat.

Ream took her full-size model of Lincoln, which she created in her studio in the Capitol, to Rome, and there the statue was carved from a block of Cararra marble. Ream was among the group of American female sculptors working in the Italian city who were known as the White Marmorean Flock. As was the practice of both male and female sculptors, Ream had her model carved in marble by skilled Italian stonecarvers. In the statue she captured a solemn Lincoln with his right leg slightly bent and his right arm extended. He looks down toward his hand, which holds the Emancipation Proclamation. The lowered head and extended arm, as well as Lincoln’s left hand, which clutches his flowing cloak, create a serious, contemplative impression. Ream returned to the United States in late 1870 and the unveiling of the statue occurred shortly thereafter in January 1871.

More than forty years later, two bronze statues by Ream were placed in the Capitol. The first was the statue of Samuel Jordan Kirkwood, donated in 1913 to the National Statuary Hall collection by the state of Iowa. Ream spent summers in Iowa, and in 1906 she was commissioned to create a statue of Kirkwood, who was governor and U.S. Senator from that state. The second work, commissioned in 1912, is the statue of Sequoya, the Native American recognized for inventing the written alphabet for the Cherokee language. Ream herself maintained throughout her life the friendships she made as a girl with Cherokees. Her statue shows Sequoya holding in his left hand a tablet with his alphabet. After Ream’s death in 1914, sculptor George Zolnay completed the statue; it was donated in 1917 to the National Statuary Hall Collection by the state of Oklahoma.

The forty-year gap between the unveiling of the statue of Lincoln and the completion of the one of Kirkwood, as well as her sporadic sculptural production, was the result of Ream’s focusing on her obligations as a wife and mother. When she married Lieutenant Richard Hoxie in 1878, he imposed restrictions on his wife’s work as a sculptor. Their son, also named Richard, was born in 1883. In addition to her work in the U.S. Capitol, Ream’s sculptures include her statue of Admiral David G. Farragut (1881) at the well-known Washington landmark, Farragut Square. Her grave in Arlington Cemetery is marked by a replica of her sculpture Sappho.

Sources Consulted

Records of the Architect of the Capitol, Washington, D.C., Art & Reference Files, Vinnie Ream.

Rubinstein, Charlotte Streifer. American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimensions. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1990.

Savage, Kirk. “Vinnie Ream’s Lincoln (1871): The Sexual Politics of a Sculptor’s Studio.” In American Pantheon: Sculptural and Artistic Decoration of the United States Capitol, edited by Donald R. Kennon and Thomas P. Somma, 160-175. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004.

Sherwood, Glenn V. Labor of Love: The Life and Art of Vinnie Ream. Hygiene, CO: SunShine Press Publications, Inc., 1997.

See also the Hoxie family papers at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division.