William Wetmore Story

Story was born on February 12, 1819, in Salem, Massachusetts, the son of Joseph Story, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and a professor at Harvard Law School. He graduated from Harvard College in 1838 and from Harvard Law School in 1840, then continued legal study under his father's supervision and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar. He practiced law and wrote legal treatises before turning fully to sculpture in his thirties.

Story had no formal art school training. After his father's death in 1845, he received a commission for a memorial statue of Joseph Story and traveled to Italy in 1847 to study sculpture in preparation for the work, then settled permanently in Rome. There he became a central figure of the American expatriate art colony, at the center of a circle that at various times included Nathaniel Hawthorne and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and whose life was later chronicled by Henry James. Working almost entirely in marble, Story produced idealized figures drawn from mythology, the Bible, and history, including Cleopatra, the Libyan Sibyl, Medea, Sappho, and Saul.

His reputation reached its height when Pope Pius IX sponsored the transport of Cleopatra and the Libyan Sibyl to the International Exhibition in London in 1862, where the two marbles became a highlight of the show. He designed the Angel of Grief for his wife's grave in Rome's Protestant Cemetery shortly before his own death. He died on October 7, 1895, at Vallombrosa Abbey, near Reggello, Italy.

Story's Cleopatra and Libyan Sibyl were, by contemporary account, the highlight of the 1862 International Exhibition in London, and critics on both sides of the Atlantic followed his work closely through the 1850s and 1860s. American and British art periodicals of the period reviewed his sculptures favorably as they emerged from his Rome studio, praising his command of classical form even before the London exhibition secured his broader reputation. Later scholarship, including the Metropolitan Museum's own survey of its sculpture collection, situates Story as a leading expatriate American sculptor of his generation, a bridge figure between the idealism of earlier American sculptors and the more naturalistic sculpture that followed.

No catalogue raisonne exists for Story, and public auction records for his work are thin. A specific all-time record sale, its work, price, and date, could not be confirmed from the sources available as of this writing. His most important works are concentrated in museum permanent collections rather than the secondary market: marble versions of Cleopatra are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the High Museum of Art, and Medea and other pieces are similarly held by institutions. No gallery or estate currently represents Story's market; his major works are held in public collections rather than marketed through a commercial gallery.

Story's market is defined by the scarcity of trustworthy comparables, not by the scarcity of the work itself. Because he produced multiple marble versions of popular compositions such as Cleopatra, collectors should expect provenance research, rather than a catalogue raisonne, to be the primary tool for confirming a given work's place in his output. With no current gallery or estate representation and no confirmed record auction price in major public sources, buyers should treat any claimed comparable sale with caution and verify pricing directly against auction house archives rather than secondary summaries.