Samuel Stillman Osgood
1808–1885 · 19th-century American portrait painter
Samuel Stillman Osgood (born in New Haven, Connecticut, June 9, 1808 – died 1885) was a nineteenth-century American portrait painter. He painted figures from the literary circle of his wife, the poet Frances Sargent Osgood, as well as popular personalities of the day such as Davy Crockett, Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Clay. His work is valued as a record of American cultural life at mid-century.
The son of James Osgood and Elizabeth Badger, he studied painting in Boston. After marrying the poet Frances Sargent Locke, he continued his training at the Royal Academy in London. Back in the United States he settled in New York, where he became an associate of the National Academy of Design. In 1849 he went to California during the Gold Rush, spending nearly a year prospecting for gold and painting portraits in San Francisco.
After his wife died of tuberculosis in 1850, he designed her memorial at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, inspired by her poem "The Hand That Swept the Sounding Lyre". It consists of a bronze lyre on a white marble base, with four of its five strings carved as cut, representing his wife and three daughters, who had all died. He asked his second wife to cut the fifth string after his death.