Figuring

by Maria Popova

She was very peculiar, but she seemed to be her actual self, and nothing affected or made up; so that, for my part, I gave her full leave to wear what may suit her best, and to behave as her inner woman prompts. But he ultimately twists his permissive fascination into capitulation to convention, adding: I don’t quite see, however, what she is to do when she grows older, for the decorum of age will not be consistent with a costume that looks pretty and excusable enough in a young woman.

Hosmer worked on her masterpiece for nearly three years. (“Nobody asks you how long you have been on a thing but fools,” Gibson had told her at the outset of her career, “and you don’t care what they think.”)

“The Doleful Ditty of the Roman Caffe Greco,” which includes these lines spoken by one of the pompous male patrons of the famed artists’ café: ’Tis time, my friends, we cogitate, And make some desperate stand. Or else our sister artists here Will drive us from the land.

It does seem hard that we at last Have rivals in the clay, When for so many happy years We had it all our way.

There are many obstacles in the path to fame, but to surmount them, to produce fine works, we must have tranquillity of mind. Those who are envious cannot be happy, nor can the vicious. We must have internal peace, to give birth to beautiful ideas. I am glad that you feel impatient to begin your statue; that impatience is love, the love of the art. The more you feel it, the more is the soul inflamed with ambition, the ambition of excellence.

The great thing in every profession, and most certainly so in art is to get a good “start,” as we Yankees say, and then all is right. But without this good start, I want to know what a young artist is to do?…I never read the life of any artist who did not date the rising of his lucky star from the hand of some beneficent friend or patron.

Harriet promises: “When you are here I shall be a model wife (or husband whichever you like).”