Clasped Hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Clasped Hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning is an 1853 sculpture by Harriet Hosmer.

Plaster casts are in the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University,[1] and at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.[2] As a bronze sculpture, versions are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art[3] and in the "Cloister of the Clasped Hands" at Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University.

[3] The artist Harriet Hosmer cast the hands of the poets herself at the request of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

The work was in the same tradition as Hiram Powers' Loulie's Hand, and they were both inspired by contemporary Spiritualism.

[10] Nathaniel Hawthorne alludes to the work in the 1860 novel The Marble Faun, as "Harriet Hosmer's Clasped Hands of Browning and his wife symbolize the individuality and heroic union of two highly poetic lives".

View from a different angle