For more than a century, her face has watched the traffic of Midtown Manhattan, the throngs of tourists and guests entering and exiting the famed Plaza Hotel. In Saint-Gaudens’ “William Tecumseh Sherman” (1903) at Continental Plaza in Manhattan, she is the winged Victory, one hand raised, the other Holding a palm leaf in one hand, he strode in front of the titular character. But it was not until 2023 that Hettie Anderson received official public recognition through words rather than likeness.
About a thousand miles away in her native South Carolina, the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission placed a historical marker on the site of the house where Anderson was born and later owned. A metal plaque reads that she was a “famous African American art model of the Gilded Age.” In fact, she was the muse for many frequently commissioned American artists at the turn of the century, such as Daniel Chester French, John La Farge, Evelyn · Evelyn Beatrice Longman and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who called her “the most handsome model I have ever seen” regardless of gender.
In the 21st century, Anderson’s life story emerges before us, full of holes, pieced together more through public documents and letters describing her work as a model than through her own words. This disparity in history is common for those who are the subjects of works of art rather than their creators, and it is even greater for her as a black woman.
Although Hettie Anderson embodies the symbol of Union victory in that sculpture, she was actually born after the Civil War as Harriette Eugenia Dickerson. Around 1873. Most likely due to the brutal treatment of black citizens by Jim Crow laws, she and her mother left the South to find work in New York City, just as many other black Americans did during the Great Migration.
In the 1890s, the light-skinned Anderson (it’s unclear why she changed her name) settled on the Upper West Side and began working as a seamstress while attending classes at the Art Students League and modeling school. Anderson was listed as “white” on the census, although she did not deny her family lineage and welcomed her relatives to visit New York. Memoirs edited by Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ son Homer indicate that he was aware of her ethnic background but was unsure how much her artist employer knew about her race.
Her “goddess-like” posture (as Saint-Gaudens described it in a letter to the artist Anders Zorn) made her a popular model for allegorical figures that serve as urban monuments, municipal buildings, memorials and parks common elements in .She also poses atop a statue of the Greek Nage in Saint-Gaudens’ sculpture civic reputationAdolph Weinman on top of what is now the David N. Dinkins Municipal Building in Manhattan (1913); the truthfor Daniel Chester French’s bronze door relief at the Boston Public Library (1897), and as a goddess in John La Farge’s fresco athens at Bowdoin College (1898).
Anderson’s face is also familiar to coin collectors. Around 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt approached Saint-Gaudens with the idea of creating a currency worthy of national attention. For Saint-Gaudens, only one model fit the bill: Heidi Anderson. He “desperately needed” her, for he wrote to a fellow artist who was busy working with her at the time, begging him to let her model the coins. In fact, a century later in 2021, the minting of the $20 gold coin made headlines when it set a coin auction record when it sold for $18.9 million at Sotheby’s.
As she got older and the modeling jobs dried up, Anderson, with the help of her artist friends, found a job at the Metropolitan Museum working in a museum classroom. She died in 1938.
So how did the story of a figure so acclaimed in her day become obscured? Of course, the artist’s model is by definition a passive figure, contributing to the artwork through her presence rather than any direct creative act.
However, Anderson was not passive in her life: her popularity allowed her to choose when to sit for whom. Proud of her work and understanding the intricacies of how to protect its property value, she declined the Saint-Gaudens family’s request to reproduce her early research as a triumphant gift from the artist, although she lent it to Saint-Gaudens retrospective.
Unfortunately, perhaps because of the power of this presence, she was erased from the records by the Saint-Gaudens family. When asked about the inspiration behind his father’s famous figures, Homer Saint-Gaudens denied the need to identify them, writing in his father’s edited memoirs: “Indeed… in all the examples of my father’s ideal sculpture , there is little or no resemblance to Homer St. Gaudens also removed the bust of Anderson, inscribed by the artist, from the official website until it was added back in 1982, ushering in a new era of interest in Anderson’s life.
The revival of the Anderson story is and will be due to the efforts of a few enthusiasts who recognized the gap between the frequency of Anderson’s portrait in American art history and the amount of scholarly research on her life. Willow Hagans and William Hagans, family members of Anderson (known as “Cousin Tootie”); Karen Strickland ), a South Carolina historian; and independent scholar Eve Kahn devoted all their time and resources to telling Anderson’s story.
Heidi Anderson is buried in Elmwood Cemetery in her hometown, where a once unmarked grave now bears a headstone bearing her name. It is funded by the South Carolina Numismatic Association and the Midland Coin Club in partnership with the state’s African American Heritage Commission. The tombstone, installed in June 2023, features an engraving rendering of the famous coin, a monument to the woman and her work.
