Among the most eminent and useful citizens of the state was Nicholas
Longworth, who came from New Jersey to Cincinnati, when just of age, in
1803. He was first to introduce the culture of grapes and the making
of wine into Ohio; he planted the Catawba vine on the uplands of
Cincinnati, where it flourished till the destruction of the forests
changed the climate. He became very rich by his investments in lands,
but he never outgrew his sympathy with the poor and struggling, and his
hand was open to every one who could intelligently profit by his help.
Many stories are told of his eccentricity. He was so simple in his dress
that he was once mistaken for one of his own workmen by a stranger whom
he had shown through his grounds, and who gave him a dime; Longworth
thanked him and put it in his pocket For a long time he received the
poor every Monday morning at his house, and gave whoever asked a loaf
of bread, or a peck of meal, or their worth in money. His charity was of
the divine order which does not seek desert in its objects. “I will help
the devil’s poor,” he said, “the miserable drunken dog, whom nobody else
will do anything for but despise and kick,” and he left the deserving
poor to others, knowing that they were sure of friends.
Hiram Powers was the first American sculptor to give us rank in Europe.
Longworth, who loved the arts as well as the industries, helped him
to go to Florence from Cincinnati, where he had begun by modeling wax
figures for a local museum. James H. Beard came from Painesville to
Cincinnati, and won there his first success as a portrait painter. He
was later to reveal the peculiar satirical gift for expressing human
character in animals, for which his brother William H. Beard is perhaps
even more famed. Among later artists, either born or bred in Cincinnati,
Frank Dengler in sculpture, and Mr. Frank Duvaneck in painting, have
shown extraordinary qualities. Dengler died at twenty-four, but not
too soon to have given proof of his great talent; Mr. Duvaneck did such
things in painting as to attract wide notice in America and Europe,
where he headed a revolt of the young painters from the Munich School,
and may be said almost to have founded a school of his own. These two
young men were of the German stock which flourishes amid the Rhine-like
hills of the Ohio; but another gifted Ohioan, who began his art life
at Cincinnati, though he was born in Trumbull County, is of that pure
American lineage commonest in the Western Reserve. Kenyon Cox, now
president of the Art Student’s League in New York, is the son of the
distinguished statesman and soldier, General J. D. Cox, who was one
of the first to enter the army from civil life, and with Garfield and
Hayes, to show military qualities second only to those of the West Point
men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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