1850s
Marble, 25” x 16” x 14”
Signed back of base

Bartholomew, a Colchester, Connecticut, native, intended to be a painter until about 1845, when he realized that he was colorblind. He had been caring for the art collection at the new Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, the nation’s first public art museum.

Sculpture became his new passion, and he moved to Italy in 1850 to pursue it. The base of this Neo-classical marble of a famous 7th-century Greek woman poet is marked “Rome.” Bartholomew later moved to Naples, where he died at the young age of 36.