Whitman, Sarah Helen (1803-1878)
Role:Dates:
Portrait Location: John Hay Library
Artist: Arnold, John Nelson (1834-1907)
Portrait Date: 1869
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 29 1/2 x 24 in. (74.93 x 60.96 cm.)
Framed Dimensions: 40 1/2 x 35 in. (102.87 x 88.9 cm.)
Brown Portrait Number: 102
Brown Historical Property Number: 1673
Sarah Helen Whitman was a true nineteenth-century New England literata: she published her poems and essays in periodicals, was well known in literary circles in New York, hosted writers at her Providence salon, and is remembered as the fianc?e of one of America's most eminent writers of the period, Edgar Allen Poe, who immortalized her in one of his poems.
Sarah Helen Power Whitman was born on January 19, 1803, in Providence, Rhode Island. She married Boston lawyer and writer John Winslow Whitman in 1828 and moved to Boston, but returned after her husband's death in 1833 to live and write in Providence. Whitman's first poem, "Retrospection," was published in 1829 in American Ladies' Magazine, simply signed "Helen." Even though her passion was writing poetry, her other literary ventures included journalism and essays and the mentoring of young writers. In 1853, her collection of poems Hours of Life was published.
Poe's and Whitman's romantic relationship began with a valentine poem she wrote for him, addressed to "The Raven," in reference to his most famous poem. Poe responded with sending her the poem "To Helen," which was based on an earlier 1831 poem of his with the same title, dedicated to a former love of his, Helen Stanard. He claimed he had first met Whitman during a summer 1845 visit to Providence, when he caught a glimpse of her in her Benefit Street doorway while he was taking a nightly stroll:
"Clad all in white, upon a violet bankI saw thee half reclining; while the moonFell on the upturn'd faces of the roses,And on thine own, upturn'd - alas, in sorrow!"
The courtship, supposedly with meetings in the Providence Athenaeum and at Swan Point Cemetery, resulted in an engagement in 1848, but Whitman broke off the relationship after one year. Whitman's critical essay Edgar Poe and His Critics, published in New York in 1860, was a passionate defense of Poe in response to literary critic Rufus Griswold's harsh if not slanderous attacks on Poe, written after the author's death in 1849. Whitman not only vehemently rebuked Giswold's posthumous defamatory remarks about Poe and his life and character, expressing her "earnest protest against the spirit of Dr. Griswold's unjust memoir," but produced a critical, scholarly essay of Poe and his literary work.
Whitman's close attachment to, and inspiration by, her native Rhode Island and its history and culture is manifested in the local origins of many of her poetic works. She wrote poems for various occasions and often performed public readings of them. She read, for example, "The Drama" (from Hours of Life, 1853) at the opening of Shakespeare Hall, a theater in Providence on November 27, 1838, wrote her poem "Roger Williams" (from Hours of Life, 1853) for the first annual celebration of the Rhode Island Historical Society on January, 13, 1847, "The Garden Sepulchre" (from Poems, 1879) for the consecration of the cemetery at Swan Point in Providence, and "Memorial Hymn" (from Poems, 1879) for the dedication of the Rhode Island Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument. Whitman was also deeply embedded within the intellectual movements of her time and region: she engaged with transcendentalism and spiritualism, and served as vice president of the RI suffrage association.
Sarah Helen Whitman died on June 27, 1878, in Providence.
In later life, as she enjoyed a modest reputation as a poet and as the former fianc?e of Edgar Allen Poe, admirers asked Sarah Helen Whitman for copies of her painted likeness. She responded to their request by having copies made of a portrait painted by Cephas Giovanni Thompson (1809-1888) in 1838, when she was a young widow of 35. She bequeathed the original painting by Thompson to the Providence Athenaeum. Brown University's version of this portrait was painted after the Thompson original by John Nelson Arnold, who rendered his copy in an oval format. Arnold lived in Providence and painted portraits of a number of governors and distinguished Rhode Island citizens.
The painting was restored in 2000 by art conservators Lance Mayer and Gay Myers, who cleaned the surface dirt, including coal dust and tobacco tar, removed a layer of yellowed varnish, and colored in areas of loss where flakes of paint had fallen off.