Vermont Sculptor Margaret Foley Created Marble Children's Fountain for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia

The fountain today, Photo Credit: Fairmont Park Horticultural Center

Margaret F. Foley (1827-1877) was a highly-praised 19th century cameo artist and sculptor, who lived in Vermont, Lowell and Boston, Massachusetts before moving to Rome, Italy where she spent the final 17 years of her life. She was widely known for her exquisite and intricate cameos of leading personages from singer Jenny Lind and poet Henry Longfellow to Senator Charles Sumner and Julia Ward Howe.

She was born in Dorset, Vermont to a working class family and lived in the town of Vergennes near Middlebury College. Her father was a farm hand, and she worked as a maid, then taught art at a local grammar school.

At age 14, she moved to Lowell, Massachusetts to work in the spinning mills, where she continued carving cameos. According to a story in the Boston Evening Transcript, "One day the overseer, Walter Wright, discovered her whittling an acorn out of chalk. He stopped and asked where her model was. "In my head," was her reply." Wright persuaded her to leave the factory and let him send her to school, giving her the start she needed.

Portrait of a Girl (1862), Photo Credit: Middlebury Museum

Foley moved to Boston in 1848, and took classes at Ednah Dow Cheney’s School of Design for Women, which opened in 1850 to provide occupational training for single women in the domestic arts. She rented studio space on Tremont Row was soon getting notice by local patrons of the art and the media. In 1857, the Transcript noted that Foley was "the only female cameo cutter in the United States. The specimens of her art now on exhibition will compare favorably with the best products of European artists."  In the following years, her cameo and bust of Reverend Theodore Parker were highly praised in local newspapers.

Despite being of frail health throughout her life, Foley determined to go to Rome, where there was already a colony of women painters and sculptors, several of them from Boston, and a wider community of male sculptors living in Rome and Florence.  

Photo credit: Smithsonian

In 1861 she moved to Rome, specializing mainly in cameos and medallions but also busts and sculptures. Among her notable works from that time is a bust of Cleopatra, now at the Smithsonian. 

Fountain at 1876 Centennial Exhibition, Photo Credit: Philadelphia Free Library

Foley's major public commission was the marble fountain for Horticultural Hall at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. According to The Boston Globe, the fountain was originally intended to cast in bronze, and be placed in Chicago, but right before the deal was closed, the Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed much of the city, and the project was abandoned by the investors. Undeterred, she finished the project in marble in 1874 and the following year the Commission of the Centennial Exhibition selected it for the Horticultural Hal in Philadelphia, where it was viewed by tens of thousands of visitors.

A year after the exhibit, just as her career was about to flourish, she died in Meran, Tyrol, Northern Italy and is buried there. In her obituary, the Transcript wrote, "Margaret Foley was an artist by nature as well as culture, and but for ill health she would have been so recognized by the world. As it is she has been able to achieve much excellent work. Personally she was of noble character, at once womanly and independent. A large and loving circle of friends in Rome is sadly bereaved in her death."

Her work is on display at the Smithsonian, Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard Art Museum, but is mostly in private collections.  

The University of Massachusetts Library includes Foley in its selection of Lowell Women History.

Margaret Foley is part of BITA's Irish Women of Massachusetts series in celebration of Irish Heritage Month and Women's History Month.