As the times changed lesbian artists became more prominent and their successes more frequent, although some achieved recognition only posthumously in the twentieth century.

In 1864 Hosmer wrote letters to the press successfully defending her work as her own, thereby gaining her rightful recognition and establishing the "masculine" medium as one that women could master. Hosmer, who was called "the most famous female sculptor of the century," was consequently influential to generations of women artists.

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Lewis's monumental masterpiece, The Death of Cleopatra (National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution), was exhibited at the Centennial Expositions in 1876 in Philadelphia and in Chicago in 1878, where it generated a tremendous amount of excitement and interest.

Whitney later taught at Wellesley College in Massachusetts; her sculpture of Clark Sumner was eventually executed and erected in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1902. Her Mount Vernon studio is now a featured stop on a walking tour of Beacon Hill in Boston.

In 1940 Bonheur's partner, the American painter Anna Elizabeth Klumpke (1856-1942), published a combination of her own memoirs and a biography of her lover. She is best known for her portraits of famous women such as Bonheur and women's rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1889, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution).

Mary Ann Willson, who apparently stopped painting upon Brundage's death, was rediscovered in 1943 and her Prodigal Son watercolor series is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art. In 1969 Willson's and Brundage's life together became the inspiration for Isabel Miller's popular novel Patience and Sarah (1972, originally self-published as A Place for Us in 1969).

In nineteenth-century America men who loved other men often suffered from guilt, but artists such as Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins celebrated male camaraderie and affection, while expatriate John Singer Sargent depicted the dandy, and photographs documented male friendships.

The most popular artist of nineteenth-century France and a renowned painter of animals, Rosa Bonheur lived in two consecutive committed relationships with women.

One of the most famous actresses of the nineteenth century, Charlotte Cushman was a commanding presence both on and off stage; she used her fortune and fame to champion the work of other women artists, among them her lover Emma Stebbins.

American sculptor Harriet Hosmer, among a handful of successful women artists in the nineteenth century, frequently scandalized the polite society of her day by her mannish dress and adventurous behavior.

Though closeted, Henry James had a number of intimate relations with young men, and his sexual orientation imbued his fiction.

American-born artist Anna Elizabeth Klumpke is best known today as the last lover of acclaimed French painter Rosa Bonheur, but she was an accomplished artist in her own right.

American sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis lived most of her life in Rome, where she was a member of a lesbian circle of American expatriates and artists.

The fiction of Isabel Miller explores and celebrates relationships between women, often across class lines.

Emma Stebbins is remembered for the sculpture that she produced between 1859 and 1869 and for being the lover of actress Charlotte Cushman.

Boston sculptor Anne Whitney, who as a woman in a male-dominated field struggled for equality, chose subjects--abolitionists, feminists, and blacks--that reflected her liberal political and social beliefs.