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Boston, Massachusetts sculptors Henry Hudson Kitson (1863?-1947) and Theo(dora) Alice Ruggles Kitson (1876-1932) were known for their monumental and portrait sculptures from the late 1800s through the 1940s, and contributed multiple sculptures and statues to Civil War national military parks and other commemorative sites throughout the United States.
Henry Kitson was born in Huddersfield, England, and emigrated to the United States where he met and taught Theo Ruggles as an art student beginning in 1886. Theo showed talent as an artist from an early age and in 1888 became the youngest woman and the first American to receive honorable mention at the Salon des Artistes Français. In 1893, after returning from France, Henry and Theo were married. They lived in Framingham, Massachusetts, and maintained studios in Boston.
On her return to the United States, Theo enjoyed a certain celebrity due to her achievements, becoming the first woman admitted to the National Sculpture Society and winning the bronze medal at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.
Both Henry and Theo executed multiple commemorative statues for historic, Revolutionary War, and Civil War sites in the United States. These included Henry's Minuetman, in Lexington, Massachusetts, and The Pilgrim Maiden in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Theo's Tadeusz Kościuszko statue in Boston Public Gardens. Theo is perhaps best known for over 70 military statues, busts, and reliefs she executed for Vicksburg National Military Park, Mississippi, making her the most prolifically represented sculptor in the park.
Theo and Henry separated in 1909 but continued to collaborate over the next 17 years until Theo died in 1932. In the last 2 decades of his life, Henry worked to convert a barn on his property in Tyringham, Massachusetts, into a working studio. Known as "Santarella" Kitson spent years on the installation of an asphalt shingled roof for the studio, intended to replicate as closely as possible the traditional thatched roof buildings of his native England, before he died in 1947.