The Woman Who Sculpted the Enemy

The room opens onto a London square, and it is full of people who do not move. A clergyman sits reading a paper he will never finish. Aristocrats and actors stand in their own borrowed clothes, glass eyes catching the light, wax skin tinted to the color of the living. Among them walks a woman in plain, coarse dress and wooden shoes, trimming a chin here, touching up a hand there, talking all the while in a voice that has not softened its colonial edges for London society.

It is 1775.

She does not just take up wax after widowhood. Left with five children and no income, she turns a hobby into a trade, modeling lifelike tinted portraits in Philadelphia and New York, one of the first professional sculptors the colonies have produced.

She does not just cross an ocean to find a market. In London she fills a room in St James’s with wax figures so exact that a visiting ambassador’s wife once sits and watches one for ten minutes before learning it is not a man. She models King George and Queen Charlotte themselves, and a statue of her making still stands in Westminster Abbey.

She does not just entertain the fashionable. She welcomes American prisoners of war into her home, raises money for their relief, and writes home that women are always useful in grand events.

She does not just gossip in her own parlor. By a story long kept in her family and never proven from any paper that survives, she is said to have packed word of British plans into the hollow heads of the very sculptures she shipped home across the sea.

Her Spark of Liberty was a country’s secrets carried home inside the faces she was paid to make.

She gave London’s elite her hands and her art, and by family memory if not by any surviving proof, she may have given her own country something far more dangerous in return. Whichever is true, she never hid which side she stood on, in a city that hosted her only because her work was too good to turn away.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

Born in 1725 on Long Island to a strict Quaker family, she was raised in Bordentown, New Jersey, and left widowed in 1769 with five children to support. Encouraged by her sister, she turned to modeling wax portraits, opening exhibitions in Philadelphia and New York before a fire and the promise of a better market carried her to London in 1772. There she built a celebrated waxworks in St James’s, modeling the royal family and the era’s leading men, all while corresponding with members of the Continental Congress and aiding American captives. In early 1786, still working in London, she suffered a fall shortly after visiting the American ambassador John Adams, and died of her injuries on March 23 of that year, around sixty-one years old. Her grave in New Jersey, which she had hoped to arrange, was never filled; her burial place in London is unknown.

Her name was Patience Lovell Wright.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

A new Sparks of Liberty short read is here. What the Candle Witnessed tells the story of the enslaved boy who taught himself to read and, by candlelight in the summer of 1776, read the anti-slavery passage that Congress struck from the Declaration of Independence. Read it now on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H6VJQW4G

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