The Portrait Gallery: Helen Keller

"The Best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen of even thouched, they must be felt with the heart." -- Helen Keller

This 2008 statue of Helen Keller by Edward Hlavka was given to the U.S. Capitol Statuary Hall Collection by the State of Alabama in 2009.

The Architect of the Capitol says this about Helen Keller:

"Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. When she was 19 months old, an illness (possibly scarlet fever or meningitis), left her deaf, blind and unable to speak. From her childhood teacher and life-long companion, Annie Sullivan, she learned to communicate by touch, Braille, and the use of a special typewriter; in 1890 a teacher from a Boston school for the deaf taught her to speak. She attended the Cambridge School for Young Ladies and then entered Radcliffe College, from which she graduated with honors in 1904. Settling outside Boston, Keller and Sullivan collaborated on Helen's autobiography, The Story of My Life. Soon, encouraged by Sullivan's husband, Keller embraced a variety of social causes, including woman suffrage. She lectured and wrote in support of these causes as well as to call attention to the plight of the physically handicapped. Following World War II, she and her secretary, Polly Thompson, traveled abroad to support the blind.She died on June 1, 1968, in Westport, Connecticut; her ashes are interred at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C."

E. E. Hlavka, 2008

And This about the statue:

"The statue by Edward Hlavka depicts a moment made famous in the biographical play and movie The Miracle Worker. It shows Keller as a seven-year-old girl wearing a pinafore over her dress. She stands at an ivy-entwined water pump with her right hand on the pump handle and her left beneath the spout to feel the flow of the water. Her expression of astonishment shows the moment when she and Annie Sullivan first communicated, by touch, the word 'water.'"