“The Sense of Nearness”: Harriet Hosmer’s Clasped Hands and the Materials and Bodies of Nineteenth-Century Life Casting

Abstract

In 1853, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning sat for a plaster life cast of their intertwined right hands. Previous accounts of this sculpture have interpreted it as a sentimental testament to the poets’ famous romance, neglecting the complexity of the casting process. This article looks anew at Hosmer’s Clasped Hands by combining close examination of the plaster and bronze versions with historical records of life casting and recent theoretical approaches to the body. This analysis draws attention to the multifaceted negotiations among artistic materials and human hands that conspired to produce this sculpture. In doing so, it troubles widely held assumptions about the indexicality of life casts, proposing instead a dynamic set of relationships better described as nearness.

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