Katharine Lane Weems, 1899-1989

An eminent 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. She was named for her father's sister, who had died as a young woman.

Gardiner Martin Lane (GML) was born in 1859, the son of Frances Eliza (Gardiner) and George Martin Lane, a classics professor at Harvard College. GML graduated from Harvard in 1881 and worked for Lee, Higginson and Company, a banking house, for several years. He was then an assistant, and later vice-president, to Charles Francis Adams, president of the Union Pacific Railway Company. In 1892, GML became a partner in Lee, Higginson and Company. He was a director of several railroad and financial companies and served as treasurer of Boston charitable funds. In 1907 he became president of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts (MFA).

Emma Louise Gildersleeve was born in 1872, the daughter of Elizabeth (Colston) and Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve. BLG had been a school friend of George Lane's and was a classics professor at Johns Hopkins University. Gardiner Lane and Emma Gildersleeve were married in 1898 and built a house called The Chimneys in Manchester, Mass., on the "North Shore." They lived in a large house on Marlborough Street in Boston, spending summers at The Chimneys. GML died of cancer in 1914. After his death, EGL became the financial manager of GML's estate, including the two households, nearly until her own death in 1954. KLW donated the Marlborough Street house to the French Institute in 1957 and in 1965 dedicated a gallery of her animal sculptures and drawings in Boston's Museum of Science to her mother.

KLW attended Miss May's School for Girls, and learned the skills expected of wealthy, prominent young women in Boston society. In 1915 she began to study drawing, and later sculpting, at the MFA; among her instructors there were Frederick Allen and Charles Grafly. In 1918, she met animal sculptor Anna Hyatt (later Huntington), who critiqued her work and encouraged her. KLW brought her love for animals, particularly dogs, ponies, and horses, to her work and became best known as an animal sculptor.

KLW 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 her Narcisse Noir, a whippet, won the George D. Widener Memorial Gold Medal at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1927. Rhinoceroses, brick friezes, and a bronze door (1937) at Harvard's Biological Laboratories, and Dolphins of the Sea (1977) outside the Aquarium, are perhaps her best-known sculptures in the Boston area. KLW also designed several medals, including the Legion of Merit and Medal for Merit in 1942. For more information about KLW's artistic work, see Louise Todd Ambler, Katharine Lane Weems: Sculpture and Drawings (Boston Athenaeum, 1987).

KLW led an active social life. She had her debut in Baltimore in 1918. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, she and a group of friends, which included editor Edward Weeks, poet David McCord, and composer Edward Ballatine, gave a few benefit concerts as the Boston Parlor Club. During World War II, KLW became a speaker and fund raiser for the Red Cross.

The title of KLW's autobiography, Odds Were Against Me: A Memoir (as told to Edward Weeks, New York: Vantage Press, 1985) refers to the way social pressures threatened KLW's artistic aspirations. KLW refused several proposals of marriage because she knew wifedom and motherhood would threaten her career as a professional sculptor. She did, however, correspond with several admirers, particularly Fontaine Carrington Weems. Born in Houston in 1884, FCW was a Princeton graduate and worked for J.P. Morgan and Company in New York. After a twenty-year correspondence, KLW married FCW in 1947 and moved to New York City, living apart from her mother for the first time; the Weemses spent summers at The Chimneys, however. Married life left little time for sculpting, so KLW turned to drawing until her husband's death in 1966.

In the 1970s, KLW resumed sculpting, took part in animal rights campaigns, and occasionally gave lectures about her work. She was living in Boston's Back Bay when she died in 1989.

For further information about her life and work, see Odds Were Against Me and Katharine Lane Weems: Sculpture and Drawings . For an extensive collection of diaries, correspondence, lectures, slides, photographs, films, and exhibition lists documenting KLW's work, contact the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, New England Regional Center in Boston.

From the guide to the Papers, 1860?-1991, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)