To the student of personal accomplishment there is always a particular satisfaction in the contrast between hard and strait beginnings and the ultimate success. He forgets, as the artist himself perhaps does when the sweets of victory are on his tongue, the long weariness of the previous struggle, and is philosophically persuaded that the pain of parturition must necessarily precede the birth of art as of life. However that may be, Brenner has had his share of privations; and it is well for him that he encountered them early and surmounted them before the enthusiasm of youth dwindled. He was born in 1871 at Shavly, in the north-west of Russia, and from his sixth to his thirteenth year attended the Hebrew school. After three years of apprenticeship to his father, who was a general mechanic and seal-cutter, with considerable talent in carving, the youth, now sixteen years old, travelled through the neighbouring towns, making seals. Then he worked for a jewelry engraver in Riga, and subsequently migrated to Mittau, where he found employment in a rubber stamp and type foundry, cutting dies and illustrations for advertisements. In 1889 he established himself in Kowno as a jewelry engraver and seal-cutter. By this time he had saved nearly enough to pay his passage to New York, and the following year he reached our shores. He was then scarcely nineteen, without friends, knowledge of the language or ready funds. For a while he sold matches on Fulton Street, and then graduated to the superior opportunities of a sweat-shop in Brooklyn. He was rescued from this by an advertisement through which he found employment with a jewelry firm. Meanwhile his acquaintance with the language and with the local conditions was improving, and it was not long before he obtained a position as seal-cutter. Then followed an engagement with Mr. H. Popper as die-cutter and jewelry engraver, during which he came to the notice of Professor S. H. Oetinger, the numismatist, whose collection of medals seems to have awakened in the young man a longing to be himself an artist. In 1891 he first learned to handle clay at the Cooper Union night class, but attended only for a month, and it was not until 1896 that he studied drawing under Ward in the night class of the Academy of Design.