Sarah de St. Prix Wyman Whitman (1842–1904) was an American stained glass artist, painter, and book cover designer.

By her third birthday, in the aftermath of her father's involvement in a bank scandal, the family had moved her to Baltimore, Maryland, where she spent most of her childhood with her wealthy Wyman relatives.

[4] The writer George Santayana described her as one of Boston's two "leading ladies" in the early 20th century, with the other being Isabella Stewart Gardner, for whom Whitman designed the carved sign over the entrance to her house, now a museum.

[4] Along with her trips to France, Whitman traveled to Spain, Italy and England several times to study architecture and the paintings of the Old Master's.

[7] Whitman won numerous awards and exhibited her work widely at venues ranging from the Society of American Artists in New York to the National Academy of Design.

[8] The Boston Museum of Fine Arts holds a number of her paintings, including Roses—Souvenir de Villier le Bel (1877 or 1879), Sunset (c. 1880), Rhododendrons (c. 1880), and A Warm Night (1889).

[9] In the early 1880s, Whitman apprenticed herself to the noted stained glass artist John La Farge, and her later independent work shows his influence.

[6][10] She described the material as "a new form of stained glass, in which it is possible to attain an infinite variety of tones in the same sheet," noting that when both opal and color are mingled "there is a magnificence of effect never seen before".

[10] The floral-motif windows are designed in colored glass against a plain translucent background and represent biblically significant plants.

Whitman's combination of function and decoration in her stained glass work was a modern innovation and would be used later by such artists as Frank Lloyd Wright.

[10][11] Whitman is considered one of the most prominent book-cover designers of her day, often ranked with Margaret Neilson Armstrong and Alice Cordelia Morse.

"Whitman helped to establish the medium, long the domain of die-cutters and binders, as a suitable specialty for artists, thus ushering in a new era in American design.

[5][7] She designed books by authors such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Celia Thaxter, and especially her friend Sarah Orne Jewett.

[12] The cover for which she is best known showed ornamental poppies, and was designed for a book for a friend, Celia Thaxter's An Island Garden.

[12] Although her aesthetic drew heavily on the Arts and Crafts Movement, her designs were almost radical in their minimalism, leaving substantially more negative space than was typical.

[13] Whitman considered that the designer's challenge was to create an aesthetically satisfying experience within the constraints imposed by the economics of book publishing.

[4] She also published one book, The Making of Pictures (Boston, 1886), which offered aspiring artists practical advice on training, media, materials, and careers.

[4] In her final years, she lived with her sister Mary Rice in South Berwick, Maine, near her close friend Sarah Orne Jewett.

"[5] The major beneficiaries of Whitman's will included the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Radcliffe College, which each received bequests of $100,000.

[17] The Boston Arts and Crafts Society organized a memorial exhibition of her book covers and stained glass windows in 1905.

[1] The artist Helen Bigelow Merriman painted a posthumous portrait of Whitman that now hangs in the Radcliffe College Room of the Schlesinger Library.