Weems, Katharine Lane, 1899-

Animal sculptor Katharine Ward (Lane) Weems was born in Boston on February 22, 1899, the only child of Gardiner Martin and Emma Louise (Gildersleeve) Lane. Gardiner Martin Lane (1859-1914, A.B. Harvard 1881) worked for the Union Pacific Railway Company and then Lee, Higginson and Company. The Lanes were married in 1898 and built a large house called The Chimneys in Manchester, Mass., where they spent summers.

Katharine (Lane) Weems attended Miss May's School for Girls, and studied sculpting at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with Frederick Allen and Charles Grafly. She also received criticism and encouragement from animal sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington. Weems was elected to the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors in 1925 and to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1952. She began to show her work in 1920 and gained a national reputation when Narcisse Noir, a whippet, won the George D. Widener Memorial Gold Medal.

Weems led an active social life, but, afraid that marriage would interfere with her artistic work, refused several proposals of marriage. She did, however, correspond with several admirers, and, after a twenty-year correspondence, in 1947 married Fontaine Carrington Weems, a Princeton graduate who worked for J.P. Morgan and Company in New York. With little time for sculpting, she turned to drawing until her husband's death in 1966. In the 1970s, she resumed sculpting; Dolphins of the Sea, outside the New England Aquarium, was unveiled in 1977. She was living in Boston's Back Bay when she died in 1989.

Sculptor; Boston, Mass. Died 1989.

Specialized in animal sculpture. Studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston under Charles Grafly, Anna Hyatt-Huntington, George Demetrios, and Brenda Putnam. She married F. Carrington Weems in 1947. Named after her aunt, watercolor painter Katharine Ward Lane, who died in 1893.