One day, when she had just put the finishing touch to a copy of _Les Bergers d’Arcadie_, at the Louvre, an elderly English gentleman stopped beside her easel, and, having examined her work with much attention, exclaimed, “Your copy, _mon enfant_, is superb, faultless! Persevere as you have begun, and I prophesy that you will be a great artist!” The stranger’s prediction gave the young painter much pleasure, and she went home that evening with her head full of joyous visions of future success. Rosa was now in her seventeenth year, vowed to art as the aim and occupation of her life, cultivating landscape, historical, and genre painting with equal assiduity, but without any decided preference for either; when, happening to make a study of a goat, she was so much enchanted with this new attempt that she thenceforth devoted herself to the cultivation of the peculiar province in which she has commanded such brilliant success. Too poor to procure models, she went out daily into the country on foot, in search of picturesque views and animals for sketching. With a bit of bread in her pocket, and laden with canvas and colors, or a mass of clay--for she was attracted equally toward painting and sculpture, and has shown that she would have succeeded equally in either--she used to set out very early in the morning, and, having found a site or a subject to her mind, seat herself on a bank or under a tree, and work on till dusk; coming home at nightfall, after a tramp of ten or a dozen miles, browned by sun and wind, soaked with rain, or covered with mud; exhausted with fatigue, but rejoicing in the lessons the day had furnished.