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A NEW AMERICAN SCULPTOR. 881

meaning, or if it had any. The meaning [[clipped]] unimportant, and it would add nothing to my delight in looking at the work to know what it is beyond what I conjecture. I should like it still better if the hands were a little more manly in character, and I should mention the fact that certain small indentations which appear in several places are not eccentricities of modeling, but are due to errors in <>; for the <> exhibited in New York is is a reduction of the original, which has been put in place in Norway. The fragments of the sculptured decoration of a Norwegian stove show much originality of conception, and the illustrative quality of the work is interesting. Man is shown struggling in the waters with the elements, typified by a great serpent, the Hidhoegur of the sagas. The uncanny types that the artist has represented, and the fine decorative way in which the work is treated, produce a fascinating effect. The handling is very broad; but in parts, as in the heads of man, the modeling is of the subtlest and most sensitive sort. The great figure of Pan, designed when cast in bronze to surmount a foundation, possesses many of the virle qualitise of the <> as a grand praize; and when the lad had obtained this he spent two years reading it and hunting specimens in the suburbs of Chicago. He was devoted to geology until he was ten years of age, but then began to feel that the science was too cold and unsympathetic for his taste, and the family removing to Iowa, he experimented in taxidermy. He went to school in Iowa for three years, studying birds and nature generally meanwhile, and formed a collection of stuffed specimens, twelve hundred in number, all mounted by himself, and including all kinds of birds and animals, from a hummingbird to big deer. At thirteen he began to engrave, and made two books of plates. Then he took to modeling birds and beasts in clay. At sixteen he made a bust of his little sister, which excited the praise of the neighbors; and leaving school, he went to work to learn engraving, for it was thought that he should have a regular trade to enable him to earn his livelihood. His first master was a man who had been engravinng thirty-five years, but his pupil soon surpassed him in his work. Afterward he had some lessons from the best engraver in Chicago, and did decorative designs. In 1881, when he was eighteen, he entered the Chicago Art School, where he drew from casts, but did not model. Later on he received orders for two busts, and started for Paris on the proceeds in November, 1883. He worked three years and a half in Cavelier's atelier, and then set up a studio at Vaugirard, near the Porte de Versailles. Here he worked unremittingly, and modeled his <> in clay. It was seen by some of his artist friends, who praised it highly, and he received an order to execute it in marble. After his success at the Champ de Mars in 1894, with the recollection of the cheers of the jury and of the honor of several receptions given for him by great people in Paris,