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Frances Wright

Artist: Nagel & Weingaertner Lithography Company, active 1849 - 1857
Copy after: Johan Gorbitz, 1782 - 1853
Sitter: Frances Wright, 6 Sep 1795 - 13 Dec 1852

Date: c. 1852

Type: Print

Medium: Lithograph on paper
Dimensions: Sheet: 46.3 × 35.5 cm (18 1/4 × 14")

Topic: Interior; Home Furnishings\Furniture\Seating\Chair; Printed Material\Papers; Costume\Dress Accessory\Handkerchief; Home Furnishings\Furniture\Table\Writing table; Equipment\Drafting & Writing Implements\Writing implement\Pen\Quill; Equipment\Drafting & Writing Implements\Inkstand; Frances Wright: Female; Frances Wright: Literature\Writer; Frances Wright: Education and Scholarship\Educator\Lecturer; Frances Wright: Society and Social Change\Reformer\Social reformer; Frances Wright: Journalism and Media\Newspaper editor; Portrait

Credit Line: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Restrictions & Rights: CC0

Object number: NPG.77.217

Exhibition Label: Born Dundee, Scotland; As a young girl in Scotland, Frances Wright developed an intense admiration for the Declaration of Independence. The document inspired her lifelong commitment to social reform and prompted her to encourage the United States to live up to its democratic ideals. Her book Views of Society and Manners in America (1821) praised the positive effects of liberty and freedom while denouncing the injustice of slavery.; After becoming a United States citizen in 1825, Wright purchased several hundred acres in Tennessee and established Nashoba, a utopian community devoted to racial and gender equality, where enslaved men and women could receive education and training while working to earn their freedom. When the experiment failed after five years, Wright resettled the commune’s thirty residents in Haiti. Always one to defy convention, she later traveled around the country, delivering lectures that advocated for women’s rights, liberalized divorce laws, birth control, state-sponsored education, and the abolition of capital punishment.

Data Source: National Portrait Gallery