s Ball's father was a house and sign painter of Boston, with some
artistic skill, which he passed on to his son. That was the boy's only
inheritance, and when his father died, he undertook the support of the
family, first as a boy-of-all-work in the New England Museum, and then
as a cameo-cutter. From that he graduated naturally to engraving,
miniature painting, and finally to portraiture.

His first attempt at modelling resulted in a bust of Jenny Lind, done
entirely from photographs, which had a wide vogue, for the Swedish
Nightingale was then at the height of her popularity. Other more
ambitious work followed, and finally, at the age of thirty-five, he was
able to realize his ambition to study in the studios of Florence. But he
found the Italian environment less inspiring than he had hoped, and two
years later he was back in Boston, working on an equestrian statue of
Washington--the first equestrian group in New England and the fourth in
the United States. He built his plaster model with his own hands, and
was three years getting it ready. The result was a work which ranks
among the first equestrian statues of the country. Other works of
importance followed, among them the well-known emancipation group
showing Lincoln blessing a kneeling slave, which was unveiled at
Washington in 1875.

The years touched Ball lightly, and at seventy years of age, he
undertook his greatest work, an elaborate Washington monument for the
town of Methuan, Massachusetts. The principal figure, a gigantic
Washington in bronze, was exhibited at the Columbian Exposition of
1893, and received the highest honors of the exposition--a distinction
it richly merited by its nobility of a conception and execution. Thomas
Ball, indeed, set a new standard in public statuary, and one which no
successor has dared to disregard. The far-reaching effects of his
influence and that of Erasmus Palmer can hardly be over-estimated.

One of the most engaging and versatile personalities in the whole range
of American art was that of William Wetmore Story. Born at Salem,
Massachusetts, in 1819, graduated at Harvard, admitted to the bar, the
author of a volume of graceful verse and of a valuable life of his
father, Chief Justice Story, he yet, in 1851, put all this work aside,
adopted sculpture as a profession, and, proceeding to Rome, opened a
studio there.

It was from the first an extraordinary studio, attracting the most
brilliant people of Rome in literatur