Considered the leading American sculptress of the nineteenth century, Harriet Goodhue Hosmer (1830 to 1908) apprenticed in Rome with a master Neoclassicist from Wales named John Gibson. She produced the clay model for her Sleeping Faun in 1864, and her mentor Gibson pronounced it “worthy to be an antique.” Rather than imitating classical renderings of a faun as a half-human, half-goat follower of the Greco-Roman god of goatherds, Hosmer chiseled marble versions of her faun with pointed ears as the only goat-like feature. Asleep in a drunken stupor, her faun has dropped grapes and a panpipe at the base of the tree stump on which he is sprawled. A little Satyr is tying to that stump the tiger’s skin draped around the inebriated faun. In 1865, the original Sleeping Faun marble was purchased by a philanthropic brewer from Dublin named… Sir Benjamin Guinness. Marble copies of her Sleeping Faun (a ca. 1870 copy, above) now grace museum galleries worldwide. (Copyright © the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology.)
Considered the leading American sculptress of the nineteenth century, Harriet Goodhue Hosmer (1830 to 1908) apprenticed in Rome with a master Neoclassicist from Wales named John Gibson. She produced the clay model for her Sleeping Faun in 1864, and her mentor Gibson pronounced it “worthy to be an antique.” Rather than imitating classical renderings of a faun as a half-human, half-goat follower of the Greco-Roman god of goatherds, Hosmer chiseled marble versions of her faun with pointed ears as the only goat-like feature. Asleep in a drunken stupor, her faun has dropped grapes and a panpipe at the base of the tree stump on which he is sprawled. A little Satyr is tying to that stump the tiger’s skin draped around the inebriated faun. In 1865, the original Sleeping Faun marble was purchased by a philanthropic brewer from Dublin named… Sir Benjamin Guinness. Marble copies of her Sleeping Faun (a ca. 1870 copy, above) now grace museum galleries worldwide. (Copyright © the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology.)
George S. Bause, M.D., M.P.H., Honorary Curator and Laureate of the History of Anesthesia, Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology, Schaumburg, Illinois, and Clinical Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. UJYC@aol.com.
