Dr. Alessandra Comini has given the first life-sized marble figure executed by Anne Whitney to the Dallas Museum of Art. Whitney was one of America’s premiere women sculptors working during the second half of the 19th century, known for her portraits of protesters and suffragist leaders, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Lloyd Garrison, and Lucy Stone. Dr. Comini donated the piece to the DMA in honor of DMA Trustee and SMU prof the late Eleanor Tufts, who discovered the long-forgotten statue in a Massachusetts backyard and brought it to Dallas. Unlike typical tabloid depictions of the 11th-century Godiva, famous for riding naked through the streets of Coventry in protest of high taxation, Whitney’s portrait has clothes, and no horse.
