Lives of Poor Boys Who Became Famous. Sarah K. Bolton
the long lane turned at last. He stopped for a year, and took up his old work to support his dying family, and then perfected his discovery. For five or six years there were many failures, – the furnaces were too hot, or the proportions were wrong; but finally the work became very beautiful. His designs from nature were perfect, and his coloring marvellous. His fame soon spread abroad; and such nobles as Montmorenci, who stood next in rank to the King, and counts and barons, were his patrons. He designed tiles for the finest palaces, ideal heads of the Saviour, and dainty forms from Greek mythology.
Invited by Catherine de Medicis, wife of King Henry II., Palissy removed to Paris, and was thenceforward called "Bernard of the Tuileries." He was now rich and famous. What a change from that day when his half-starved wife and children fled along the streets of Saintes, their furniture broken up for furnace-fires! And yet, but for this blind devotion to a single object, he would have remained a poor, unknown glass-painter all his life. While in Paris, he published two or three books which showed wide knowledge of history, mines, springs, metals, and philosophy. He founded a Museum of Natural History, and for eight years gave courses of lectures, attended by all the learned men of the day. When his great learning was commented upon, he replied, "I have had no other book than the sky and the earth, known to all." A wonderful man indeed!
All his life Palissy was a devoted Huguenot, not fearing to read his Bible, and preach to the people daily from it. Once he was imprisoned at Bordeaux, and but for his genius, and his necessity to the beautifying of palaces and chapels, he would have been put to death. When he was seventy-six, under the brutal Henry III., he was shut up in the Bastille. After nearly four years, the curled and vain monarch visited him, and said, "My good man, you have been forty-five years in the service of the Queen my mother, or in mine, and we have suffered you to live in your own religion, amidst all the executions and the massacres. Now, however, I am so pressed by the Guise party and my people, that I have been compelled, in spite of myself, to imprison these two poor women and you; they are to be burnt to-morrow, and you also, if you will not be converted."
"Sire," answered the old man, "you have said several times that you feel pity for me; but it is I who pity you, who have said, 'I am compelled.' That is not speaking like a King. These girls and I, who have part in the kingdom of heaven, we will teach you to talk royally. The Guisarts, all your people, and yourself, cannot compel a potter to bow down to images of clay."
The two girls were burnt a few months afterward. The next year, 1589, Henry III. was stabbed by a monk who knelt before his throne; and the same year, Palissy died in the Bastille, at the age of eighty.
BERTEL THORWALDSEN
A few months ago we visited a plain old house in Copenhagen, the boyhood home of the great Danish sculptor. Here he worked with his father, a poor wood-carver, who, thinking his boy would be a more skilful workman if he learned to draw, sent him to the Free Royal Academy of Fine Arts when he was twelve years old. At the end of four years he took a prize, and the fact was mentioned in the newspapers. The next day, one of the teachers asked, "Thorwaldsen, is it your brother who has carried off the prize?"
Bertel's cheeks colored with pride as he said, "No, sir; it is I." The teacher changed his tone, and replied, "Mr. Thorwaldsen, you will go up immediately to the first rank."
Years afterward, when he had become famous, he said no praise was ever so sweet as being called "Mr." when he was poor and unknown.
Two years later, he won another prize; but he was now obliged to stay at home half the time to help support the large family. Obtaining a small gold medal from the Academy, although so modest that, after the examination, he escaped from the midst of the candidates by a private staircase, he determined to try for the large gold medal. If he could obtain this, he would receive a hundred and twenty dollars a year for three years, and study art in Italy. He at once began to give drawing-lessons, taught modelling to wealthy boys, and helped illustrate books, working from early morning till late at night. He was rarely seen to smile, so hard was the struggle for daily bread. But he tried for the medal, and won.
What visions of fame must have come before him now, as he said good-by to his poor parents, whom, alas, he was never to see again, and, taking his little dog Hector, started for far-away Italy! When he arrived, he was so ill and homesick that several times he decided to give up art and go back. He copied diligently the works of the old masters, and tried in vain to earn a little money. He sent some small works of his own to Copenhagen; but nobody bought them. He made "Jason with the Golden Fleece," and, when no one ordered it, the discouraged artist broke it in pieces. The next year he modelled another Jason, a lady furnishing the means; and while everybody praised it, and Canova said, "This young Dane has produced a work in a new and grand style," it did not occur to any one to buy the statue in marble.
An artist could not live on praise alone. Anxious days came and went, and he was destitute and wretched. He must leave Rome, and go back to the wood-carving in Copenhagen; for no one wanted beautiful things, unless the maker was famous. He deferred going from week to week, till at last his humble furniture had been sold, and his trunks waited at the door. As he was leaving the house, his travelling companion said to him, "We must wait till to-morrow, from a mistake in our passports."
A few hours later, Mr. Thomas Hope, an English banker, entered his studio, and, struck with the grandeur of his model of Jason, asked the cost in marble. "Six hundred sequins" (over twelve hundred dollars), he answered, not daring to hope for such good fortune. "That is not enough; you should ask eight," said the generous man, who at once ordered it.
And this was the turning-point in Bertel's life. How often a rich man might help a struggling artist, and save a genius to the world, as did this banker! Young Thorwaldsen now made the acquaintance of the Danish ambassador to Naples, who introduced him to the family of Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt, where the most famous people in Rome gathered. Soon a leading countess commissioned him to cut four marble statues, – Bacchus, Ganymede, Apollo, and Venus. Two years later, he was made professor in the Royal Academy of Florence.
The Academy of Copenhagen now sent him five hundred dollars as an expression of their pride in him. How much more he needed it when he was near starving, all those nine years in Rome! The bashful student had become the genial companion and interesting talker. Louis of Bavaria, who made Munich one of the art centres of the world, was his admirer and friend. The Danish King urged him to return to Copenhagen; but, as the Quirinal was to be decorated with great magnificence, Rome could not spare him. For this, he made in three months his famous "Entry of Alexander into Babylon," and soon after his exquisite bas-reliefs, "Night" and "Morning," – the former, a goddess carrying in her arms two children, Sleep and Death; the latter, a goddess flying through the air, scattering flowers with both hands.
In 1816, when he was forty-six, he finished his Venus, after having made thirty models of the figure. He threw away the first attempt, and devoted three years to the completion of the second. Three statues were made, one of which is at Chatsworth, the elegant home of the Duke of Devonshire; and one was lost at sea. A year later, he carved his exquisite Byron, now at Trinity College, Cambridge.
He was now made a member of three other famous academies. Having been absent from Denmark twenty-three years, the King urged his return for a visit, at least. The Royal Palace of Charlottenburg was prepared for his reception The students of the Academy escorted him with bands of music, cannon were fired, poems read, cantatas sung; and the King created him councillor of state.
Was the wood-carver's son proud of all these honors? No. The first person he met at the palace was the old man who had served as a model for the boys when Thorwaldsen was at school. So overcome was he as he recalled those days of toil and poverty, that he fell upon the old man's neck, and embraced him heartily.
After some of the grandest work of his life in the Frue Kirke, – Christ and the Twelve Apostles, and others, – he returned to Rome, visiting, on the way, Alexander of Russia, who, after Thorwaldsen had made his bust, presented the artist with a diamond ring.
Although a Protestant, accounted now the greatest living sculptor, he was made president of the Academy of St. Luke, a position held by Canova when he was alive, and was commissioned to build the monument of Pius VII. in St. Peters. Mendelssohn, the great composer, had become his warm friend, and used to play for him as he