Object Annotation #3

Harriet Goodhue Hosmer's Clasped Hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1853)

The original bronze casting is housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Other replicas have been displayed at the National Women in The Arts Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

Context, Significance etc.

Overview

This is a sculpture depicting the clasped hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Brownings were incredibly famous for their literature in the 19th century. Their most memorable writing in the modern literary world is actually exchanges between each other through love letters that have been historically collected. The hands themselves are the actual casting of the couple's interlocked hands and suggests the idea of touch as a dynamic experience. One that can invoke concepts of violence, or, in this case, concepts of intimacy amongst times of social conflict or unrest. Other commentary on the piece itself has included noting the elements of independence and unity both present contextually due to both author's rapport within their own individual lives before coming together.

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Key

When we think about touch as an expression of proximity and closeness, it falls into ideas of intimacy defined by the sixteenth century male gaze. Thus, a viewer seeing the two hands may immediately assume a romantic relationship even if nothing is apparently indicative of one. Bolland applies a similar analysis when discussing Bernini's Apollo and Daphne by stating that the duality of touch in the sculpture can disillusion reality for a viewer. She writes: "Yet both types of touch, as represented here, are transformed from their normal associations with sculpture: erotic satisfaction is confounded, rather than satisfied, by touch, and the touching hand discerns something that belies..." ("Desiderio and Diletto: Vision, Touch, and the Poetics of Bernini's Apollo and Daphne" 322)

Hosmer's intentional signaling of a distinction between Elizabeth and Robert's hands is partially formed by gender constructions both at the time and still present today. Hosmer was known as a suffragette as well as an artist, and the cultural context in which she casted her two friends hands aids in conversation with what Sharon Assaf posits George Penzc's work is informed by. She notes that there was a desire from some artists after theological reform to "define women's role in society through the promotion of their contribution, through work in the home, to husband, family, and community." ("The Ambivalence of the Sense of Touch in Early Modern Prints" 87) Here, Hosmer is showcasing a partnership, an exchange and representation of what an equal gendering can look like in art. The frilled wrist cuff in contrast with the straight edged wrist cuff implies gender, but what I see beyond that is a celebration of touch that can be intimate while also empowering.

Additionally, the active/passiveness present in this work appears when a viewer realizes Elizabeth's hand is actually being held in Roberts, reinstating the idea of a woman as a passive participant in touch rather than a man who is an "active" participant.