TitleHarriet Beecher Stowe
Artist
Thomas Hicks
(1823 - 1890)
Date[1855]
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 20 3/4 × 16 5/8 in.
Framed: 31 5/8 × 27 3/4 × 1 1/2 in.
SignedSigned lower right: "T. Hicks"
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY, Bequest of James A. Suydam, 1865
Object number574-P
Label TextHarriet Elizabeth Beecher (1811-1896) was born in Litchfield, Connecticut. Her father, the distinguished Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher, had a decided influence on her early education. At age twenty-one she joined him when he moved to Cincinnati to head the Lane Theological Seminary. There she worked as a teacher and began writing. In 1836 she married the Reverend Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor at the seminary, and spent the next fourteen years rearing their children. In 1850 the Stowes moved to Brunswick, Maine, and Harriet returned to her literary endeavors. That year, having become increasingly involved with the abolitionist movement-and prompted by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law-she began writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or "Life among the Lowly." It was published serially in the National Era magazine over the following two years and released as a book in 1852. Uncle Tom's Cabin added fuel to the abolitionist movement and gave Stowe lasting fame. She followed it with a second anti-slavery novel, "Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp" (1856).The recognition these books earned her domestically and abroad helped her raise vast sums for the anti-slavery movement. She continued writing novels and essays for the rest of her life and again won considerable notoriety when in 1869 she published "The True Story of Lady Byron's Life" in the Atlantic Monthly, an article that charged Lord Byron with incest. She spent her final years in Florida but remained active in social-reform movements.
Collections
- 19th Century Highlights from the Collection
- Past as Prologue Part I
