[4] She was a delicate child, and was encouraged by her father, physician Hiram Hosmer, to pursue a course of physical training by which she became expert in rowing, skating, and riding.

The hard-handed men of Italy worked in marble from the designs put before them; one copied the leaves which the sculptor threw into the wreaths around the brows of his heroes; another turned with the tool the folds of the drapery; another wrought up the delicate tissues of the flesh; none of them dreamed of ideas - they were copyists - the very hand-work that her head needed.

And to Italy she went...While living in Rome, she associated with a colony of artists and writers that included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bertel Thorvaldsen, William Makepeace Thackeray, the philosopher and feminist Frances Power Cobbe and the two female Georges, Eliot and Sand.

She was very peculiar, but she seemed to be her actual self, and nothing affected or made up; so that, for my part, I gave her full leave to wear what may suit her best, and to behave as her inner woman prompts.The artists included Anne Whitney, Emma Stebbins, Edmonia Lewis, Louisa Lander, Margaret Foley, Florence Freeman, and Vinnie Ream.

[19] Hosmer died at Watertown, Massachusetts, on February 21, 1908, and is buried in the family plot at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge.

[citation needed] As the National Museum of Women in the Arts put it, "Harriet Goodhue Hosmer defied 19th-century social convention by becoming a successful sculptor of large scale, Neoclassical works in marble.

Women usually produced artwork that could be done in their home, such as still lives, portraits, landscapes, and small scale carvings, although even Queen Victoria allowed her daughter, the Princess Louise, to study sculpture.

[22] During World War II the Liberty ship SS Harriet Hosmer was built in Panama City, Florida, and named in her honor.

The school was originally dedicated to both Hiram and Harriet's cousin Dr. Alfred Hosmer in honor of their years of service to the community.

On February 1, 2022, to mark the occasion of the opening of the newly renovated school, the town of Watertown rededicated the building to include Harriet.

From the rededication ceremony; "This change is not to exclude, demote, nor snub the Doctors Hiram and Alfred Hosmer, rightly honored for their combined decades of service to the town, but rather to include Harriet, internationally famous even in her own time when women had fewer outlets for publicly acknowledged accomplishments.