At about this time, there came upon the scene the first and only really famous woman sculptor in the history of American art, Harriet Hosmer. She had had an unusual childhood, and had grown into an original and engaging woman. Born in 1830, at Watertown, Massachusetts, the daughter of a physician, she inherited her mother's delicate constitution, and her father encouraged her in an outdoor life of physical exercise such as only boys, at that time, were accustomed to. She became expert in rowing, riding, skating and shooting, developed great endurance, filled her room with snakes and insects and birds' nests, and in a clay pit at the end of her father's garden modelled rude figures of animals. A few years of schooling followed this wild girlhood; then she was sent to Boston to study drawing and modelling; but finding that no woman would be admitted to the Boston Medical School, whose course in anatomy she was anxious to take, she went to St. Louis and entered the medical college there. Finally, in 1852, accompanied by her father and Charlotte Cushman, she set sail for Italy. She remained there for eight years, turning out a number of very creditable figures, which, if not great, at least possess some measure of grace and charm. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his "Italian Note-Book," has left a vivid impression of Miss Hosmer, whose eccentricity of dress and manner impressed him deeply, as did also the work which she showed him. But she never reached any high development. Which brings us to the present of American art, for the sculptors we have yet to consider are either yet alive or have died so recently that they belong to the present rather than the past. The first and one of the most important of these is John Quincy Adams Ward, born in 1830 on an Ohio farm. An accident showed the possession of latent talent, for some good pottery clay happened to be discovered on his father's farm, and his guardian angel inspired the boy to take a handful of it and model the grotesque countenance of a negro servant. The result was striking, and no doubt he felt within himself some of the stirrings of genius, but not until 1849 did he realize his vocation. Then, while on a visit to a sister in Brooklyn, he happened to pass the open door of H. K. Brown's studio. The glimpse he caught of the scene within fascinated him; he returned again and again, and ended by entering the studio as a pupil.