Mrs. Wright is not known to have essayed sculpture, or to have worked in any resisting material, so that the first native American sculptor was William Rush. He was born in Philadelphia, July 4, 1756, being fourth in direct descent from John Rush, who commanded a troop of horse in Cromwell’s army, and, having embraced the principles of the Quakers, came to Pennsylvania the year following the landing of William Penn. From the emigrant John Rush was also descended, in the fifth generation, the celebrated Benjamin Rush, physician and politician, and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The father of William was Joseph Rush, who married, at Christ Church, Philadelphia, September 19, 1750, Rebecca Lincoln, daughter of Abraham Lincoln, of Springfield Township, now in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. She was of the same family as Abraham Lincoln, the martyr President of the United States. I am thus minute in tracing the ancestry of William Rush, in order to establish and place upon record, beyond a question or doubt, that he was the first American sculptor by birth and parentage, and thus set at rest, the claim, so frequently made, that this honor belongs to John Frazee,[1] a man not born until 1790. Rush served in the army of the Revolution, and it was not until after peace had settled on the land that he seems to have turned his attention to art. He soon became noted for the life-like qualities he put into the figureheads, for the prows of ships, he was called upon to carve, and so noted did these works become, that many orders came to him from Britain, for figureheads for English ships. The story is told that when a famous East Indiaman, the _Ganges_, sailed up that river, to Calcutta, with a figure of a river-god, carved by Rush, at its prow, the natives clambered about it as an object of adoration and of worship. Benjamin H. Latrobe, the noted architect, in a discourse before the Society of Artists of the United States, in 1811, says, speaking of Rush: “His figures, forming the head or prow of a vessel, place him, in the excellence of his attitudes and actions, among the best sculptors that have existed; and in the proportion and drawing of his figures he is often far above mediocrity and seldom below it. There is a motion in his figures that is inconceivable. They seem rather to draw the ship after them than to be impelled by the vessel. Many are of exquisite beauty. I have not seen one on which there is not the stamp of genius.”