September 1, 1815
Emma Stebbins was born in New York City to John Stebbins (1793-1834) and Mary Largin Stebbins (d. 1874). She was one of nine children.
Emma Stebbins
The Heckscher Museum of Art features the largest public collection of sculptures by Emma Stebbins (American, 1815–1882). She is one of the most significant American sculptors of the nineteenth century. While her Bethesda Fountain in Central Park has been a global icon for 150 years, the full scope of Stebbins’s life and work is virtually unknown. From 1857 to 1870, she created innovative sculptures while living in Rome with her wife, renowned Shakespearean actress Charlotte Cushman, who championed her career. Stebbins modeled inventive and incisive interpretations of literary and biblical subjects, unprecedented allegories of American industry, and notable portraits of her friends and family. In 1863, with the order for the Bethesda Fountain, she became the first woman to earn a commission for a public sculpture from the city of New York. When Bostonians installed her statue of educator Horace Mann on the grounds of the Massachusetts State House in 1865, she became the first woman in the country to complete an outdoor bronze monument. In 2025–2026, the Heckscher is presenting the first museum exhibition of her work, Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History.
1838–41
Stebbins became acquainted with Henry Inman when he painted portraits of her parents and her brother Henry G. Stebbins. According to one period source, Inman “offered to give her instruction in oil-painting. She had never before taken lessons, and was pleased with the
prospect of study.” Stebbins also met sculptor Edward Augustus Brackett around this time. According to Mary Stebbins Garland’s manuscript about her sister’s career, she “was interested in his methods, received hints from him, and learned that form was the most satisfying medium of expression.”
1853–56
Stebbins was one of seven “Lady Managers” supervising the New-York School of Design for Women, which was founded in 1852. Its goal was “to give instruction to women, either gratuitously, or at very low rates, which will qualify them to earn a living by the practice of some of the branches taught in it, or to become teachers in other schools.”
1856
Stebbins sailed for Le Havre, France, with her mother and her sister Caroline Stebbins. In Rome, she met American actress Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876). In the biography of Cushman that she would later publish, Stebbins recalled, “It was in the winter of 1856–57 that the compiler of these memoirs first made Miss Cushman’s acquaintance, and from that time the current of their two lives ran, with rare exceptions, side by side.”
May 31, 1873
Stebbins became the first woman to complete a public sculpture commission for the city of New York when Central Park unveiled her Bethesda Fountain. The allegorical artwork celebrates the aqueduct that brought clean water to the city following a cholera epidemic. At the top, the Angel of the Waters appears to alight on a natural spring. Water flows from a rock at her feet, cascades over cherubs representing Temperance, Purity, Heath and Peace, and pools in a large basin.
1876–78
Stebbins worked to write, edit, and publish the posthumous biography Charlotte Cushman: Her Letters and Memories of Her Life (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1878)
October 24, 1882
Stebbins died in New York City at age sixty-seven. She was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Several newspapers printed the following: “The death of Miss Emma Stebbins . . . has removed from the world a woman of unusual mental power and brilliancy . . . and with enough genius for the sculptor’s art to induce her to devote her life to its development.”
2025
The Heckscher Museum presents the first museum exhibition of her work, Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History
Artwork in the Collection
Emma Stebbins, Industry (left) and Commerce (right), 1860, Marble.
The Heckscher Museum of Art has a long relationship with Stebbins’s work. Around 1859, Charles August Heckscher, an uncle of the museum’s founder August Heckscher, commissioned two sculptures by Stebbins, Industry and Commerce. The pair have been part of the institution’s collection since the 1920s. In recent years, guided by our Collection Stewardship Committee, we acquired three additional sculptures by the artist and now enjoy the privilege of stewarding the most extensive collection of Stebbins’s work.
Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History Catalog
Accompanying the groundbreaking exhibition Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History, a richly illustrated 256-page catalog edited by Heckscher Museum Chief Curator Karli Wurzelbacher, PhD. is available. This comprehensive volume will include scholarly contributions and the reflections of contemporary artists from around the world. Contributors include Wurzelbacher; Tony Award-winning playwright and screenwriter, Tony Kushner; artist Patricia Cronin; Photographer Ricky Flores; David J. Getsy of the University of Virginia; Melissa L. Gustin of National Museums Liverpool; Katrin Horn of the University of Greifswald; and Laura Turner Igoe of the James A. Michener Art Museum.
