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.

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