Vinnie Ream was born in Madison, Wisconsin, where her father Robert L. Ream had brought his family in 1836.  According to the 1860 U.S. census, her real name may have been Lavinia and her real birth date 1842 rather than 1847. Robert Ream ran a hotel  and received several political appointments, but in 1852 moved his family to Washington, D.C., to work for the U.S. General Land Office. The family moved to Kansas in 1854 and back to Washington in 1860. During those years Vinnie and her sister spent some time at  girls' schools in Missouri, where Vinnie displayed talents for music, art and writing. 
 
Prosperity eluded Robert Ream, and in 1862 Vinnie went to work in the dead letter department of the U.S. Post Office to help the family finances. Pretty, intelligent and witty, she became acquainted with a number of politicians and military officers, and became a protege of Clark Mills, a successful sculptor. In his studio she learned to model portrait medallions and busts, made useful contacts in the art world, and gained admission to the White House where she worked on a portrait bust of President Lincoln.
 
After Lincoln's assassination, Ream used her contacts to gain a commission to model a memorial statue of the President. The award was highly controversial because of her youth, inexperience, and the lack of competition from other sculptors, but the model was completed by 1869.
 
Ream took her parents and the model to Rome where, following a common practice of the time, the model was duplicated in marble by Italian workmen. Ream also used her year in Rome to study, sculpt, and network among the city's artistic colony. Her completed Lincoln statue was unveiled in in the Capitol at Washington in January, 1870, to general if not unanimous approval. Ream continued to work in New York and Washington, but with little financial success until in 1875 she received a commission to sculpt the statue of Admiral David Farragut.

For more than a decade Ream had worked hard to keep herself in the public eye, form a coterie of supporters, and achieve artistic stature, but financial security continued to elude her. Her family took in boarders to make ends meet, oneof whom was Lt. Richard L. Hoxie of the U.S. Corps of Engineers. He and Vinnie were married May 28, 1878.  Their only child, a son, was born in 1883.
 
Her husband's career eventually took Vinnie and her family away from Washington and her artistic circle. Although she continued to model and sculpt, she did not obtain another public commission until 1906, when she began work on a statue of James Kirkwood, Iowa's Civil War governor. In 1912 she received the commission for a statue of the great Cherokee chief Sequoyah for Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol.  She died before the model was finished, and the work was completed by her friend George Zolnay.
 
With exceptional  energy, skill  and determination, Vinnie Ream Hoxie shaped her career during a period in which social, legal and educational obstacles prevented most women from moving beyond the approved roles of wife and mother. Her Lincoln statue stands in the Capitol rotunda and her Sequoyah in Statuary Hall.  Examples of her work in Wisconsin include "The West" in the Wisconsin Capitol building, and  "Spirit of the Carnival" at the Wisconsin Historical Society.
 

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[Source: Cooper, Edward. Vinnie Ream: an American Sculptor (Academy Chicago Publishing, 2004); Sherwood, Glenn Sherwood. Labors of Love: the Life and Art of Vinnie Ream. (SunShine Press Publications, 1997).]