Sarah Wyman Whitman

Sarah Wyman Whitman (1842-1904) was a painter, stained glass artist, and book cover designer based in Boston. Whitman was also a doyenne of Boston society, along with Isabella Stewart Gardner for whom she designed a sign over the entrance to her house, now a museum in the Fenway. Married to Henry Whitman, a wool and dry goods merchant, they entertained in their home on Beacon Hill and summered in Beverly Farms on the North Shore. In addition to her social activities, Whitman was deeply involved in philanthropy. She founded the Boston Water Color Club in response to the Boston Society of Water Color Artists who only admitted men, and co-founded the Boston Arts & Crafts Society. Whitman advocated for Radcliffe College and better educational opportunities for women and children in the public school system, and she was a benefactor of Howard University and Tuskegee Institute.

Whitman studied painting with William Morris Hunt of the Boston Museum School from 1868 to 1871, and studied drawing with William Rimmer. In the late 1870s, she traveled to France and studied drawing with Hunt’s former master Thomas Couture. She worked in oil and pastel, painting landscapes around New England as well as floral studies. She also painted numerous portraits, preferring to paint her subjects against dark backgrounds. She exhibited widely in the 1870s through the 1890s, including the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

In the early 1880s, Whitman apprenticed with John La Farge, a stained glass artist who utilized opalescent glass in his work and innovated methods of layering and welding glass. Whitman also used opalescent glass in her own work along with colored and transparent glass. Whitman later started her own firm, Lily Glass Works, and her stained glass windows can be found in churches and colleges throughout New England, including the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, Memorial Hall at Harvard University, Trinity Church in Boston, and First Parish Church in Brookline. For Harvard’s Memorial Hall she designed both the elaborate south transept window and the Honor and Peace window on the south side of what is now Annenberg Hall.

In 1884, Whitman was asked to design book covers for the publishing company Houghton Mifflin. She designed over 200 books, working in the Art Nouveau style using organic forms and delicate line work. She also employed gold stamping and was one of the first to carry the design over the front, spine, and back of the book.

Whitman designed many book covers for her dear friend Sarah Orne Jewett, author of Country Of The Pointed Firs and A Marsh Island, among others. Wyman also designed a stained glass window in memory of Jewett’s father at his alma mater, Bowdoin College.

More images of her book cover designs can be seen at the Boston Public Library’s flickr site, https://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/sets/72157604192955355/, and at the University of Wisconsin online digital archives.

Sources

Smith, Betty S. “Sarah de St. Prix Wyman Whitman.” Old Time New England, V. 77, No. 266, Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, Boston, 1999.

https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/3350

http://www.designworklife.com/2014/04/30/sarah-wyman-whitman/

Sarah Wyman Whitman

http://bindings.lib.ua.edu/designerbios/whitman.html