'', 1865, this version 1868 (
Metropolitan Museum of Art) William Wetmore Story was the son of
U.S. Supreme Court judge
Joseph Story and Sarah Waldo (Wetmore) Story. He graduated from
Harvard College in 1838 and the
Harvard Law School in 1840. After graduation, he continued his law studies under his father, was admitted to the Massachusetts bar, and prepared two legal treatises of value –
Treatise on the Law of Contracts not under Seal (2 vols., 1844) and
Treatise on the Law of Sales of Personal Property (1847). He abandoned law to devote himself to sculpture, and after 1850 lived in
Rome, where he had first visited in 1848, and where he counted among his friends the
Brownings and
Walter Savage Landor. In 1856, he received a commission for a bust of his late father, now in the Memorial Hall/Lowell Hall,
Harvard University. Story's apartment in
Palazzo Barberini became a central location for Americans in Rome. During the American Civil War his letters to the
Daily News in December 1861 (afterwards published as a pamphlet,
The American Question, i.e. of neutrality), and his articles in ''
Blackwood's Magazine'', had considerable influence on English opinion. One of his most famous works,
Cleopatra, (1858) was described and admired in
Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1860 romance,
The Marble Faun, and is on display in New York, NY at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Gallery 700. Another work, the
Angel of Grief, has been replicated near the
Stanford Mausoleum at
Stanford University. Among the other life-size statues he completed were those of
Saul,
Sappho,
Electra,
Semiramide,
Delilah,
Judith,
Medea,
Jerusalem Desolate,
Sardanapolis,
Solomon,
Orestes,
Canidia, and
Shakespeare. His
Saul was completed in Rome in 1865, and taken to England by
Noel Wills who displayed it at
Rendcomb College. It is now in the collection of
North Carolina Museum of Art,
Raleigh. His
Sibyl and
Cleopatra were exhibited at the 1863 Universal Exposition in London. In the 1870s, Story submitted a design for the
Washington Monument, then under a prolonged and troubled construction. Although the Washington National Monument Society considered his proposals "vastly superior in artistic taste and beauty" to the original 1836 design by
Robert Mills, they were not adopted, and the monument was completed to Mills' scheme, only slightly modified. Story also sculpted a bronze statue of
Joseph Henry on the Mall in
Washington, D.C., the scientist who served as the
Smithsonian Institution's first Secretary. His works
Libyan Sibyl,
Medea and
Cleopatra are on display at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park, NYC, NY. Story died at
Vallombrosa Abbey, Italy, a place he was sentimentally attached to and which he chronicled in an informal travel journal,
Vallombrosa in 1881. He is buried with his wife, Emelyn Story, in the
Protestant Cemetery, Rome, under a statue of his own design,
Angel of Grief. A 1903 posthumous biography of Story (and his circle), entitled
William Wetmore Story and His Friends, was penned by
Henry James.
Family His children also pursued artistic careers:
Thomas Waldo Story (1854–1915) became a sculptor;
Julian Russell Story (1857–1919) was a successful portrait painter; and
Edith Marion (1844–1907), the Marchesa Peruzzi de' Medici, became a writer. ==Selected works==