WOMAN IN ART
the daughter of the architect of the wonderful Cathedral of Strasbourg, who in the fourteenth century composed and chiseled in stone (working side by side with her father) the statues of the five wise and five foolish virgins which adorn the main entrance of that beautiful building. That bit of storied history proved to be the key to the inner sanctum of the young girl's life, for it awakened and set flame to aspirations for an art practiced only by men in her day. She would, and she must study art. It was finally arranged, and at seventeen she was working in the Academy of Fine Arts at Munich.
The professor of sculpture took her under his special care, escorting her daily from the home of a friend where she lived to the lecture hall; and to his amazement the presence of a young girl in a class of men had a most subduing effect. Chaos ceased and real work began, greatly to the surprise of the directors of the institution, who had been almost adamant against admitting a woman to the Academy. After two years the ardent worker moved on to Berlin for more advanced work with Christian Rauch, the most famous sculptor of his time. Especially was he at that time most celebrated because of his beautiful, recumbent statue of Queen Louise at Charlottesburg, and that of Frederick the Great in Berlin.
Rauch was a man of few words, who appreciated every help that had been given to him in his craving for an art education, yet when the girl-aspirant of nineteen entered his studio he briefly asked her to model a composition of her own; in a few days, on the strength of that composition, and the distinction of her two years' work in the Munich Academy, he recommended her for a two years' scholarship in the Berlin Academy. The authorities of that institution put up the bars; the student recommended was a woman! Objections were many and strenuous, but in the end she carried her point, and entered the Berlin Academy triumphantly. When her two years of scholarship expired. Christian Rauch offered the young artist a studio next to the government studio which he occupied, that her work might be under his immediate supervision, and for two years more she enjoyed the inestimable advantage of association with the greatest sculptor of that time. Death took the sculptor at the end of the two years, in his eighty-third year, and his pupil of twenty-three became in her turn what he had been in his—the portrait artist of the great men of her day, Von Humboldt, Von Liebig, Jacob Grimm, Schopenhauer, Garibaldi, Bismarck and many of lesser fame.
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