Harriet Maria Spelman was born in Boston on May 21, 1848 and grew up in Cambridge near the Longfellow family. She attended school with some of the Longfellow children and became friends with Alice Longfellow. She also often accompanied Longfellow family members on trips including excursions to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. On her twentieth birthday she married Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet’s second son. Once described as “the prettiest girl in Cambridge”, Harriet, or Hattie as friends and family referred to her, receives relatively little mention in the Longfellow family archives. Even her husband’s autobiography of sorts, Random Memories, only refers to her in passing as “my wife”, her name is never mentioned.
Despite the comparative lack of attention received in family records, Harriet left considerable evidence of her artistic talents in the form of watercolors and pencil sketches, both as individual works of art and in the pages of her sketchbooks. While her husband worked as a professional artist and often traveled in order to find subjects for his work, Harriet would accompany him and keep pace artistically in her own quiet manner. The image shown here (actual size 6 3/4" x 4 1/2") is one of a series of nine small views of scenes in Italy and Egypt, painted in 1899 during one of the many trips she and Ernest took to Europe and Egypt. The painting is signed “HSL” and annotated with “Florence from our window - April 11. 1899”. It is displayed in the Longfellow House’s second floor guest bedroom. Evidence of formal training in the arts for Harriet seems scarce, but the works she produced demonstrate a keen eye and deft hand with pencil and brush.
Starting in her thirties, Harriet suffered from mental health issues and spent time in sanatoriums in Massachusetts and elsewhere, occasionally undergoing experimental treatments for what seems to have been acute depression. She died at her home in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts in 1937, having outlived her husband by some sixteen years. She was laid to rest in the Longfellow family plot at Mount Auburn Cemetery.