WOMAN IN ART
earth as long as time is. Spirit is the parent of thought, thought is the parent of action. When action symbolizes or expresses spirit in material form, so that the human spirit responds to spirit in the inanimate, the thought and hand have accomplished great art.
Everyone has a background. Our artist harks back to the nation of artists where the name was Longmain, which may account for her having the hand of a sculptor, though her father is of English extraction, where the French name became anglicized. Her mother was English-Canadian. The future artist was the fifth in the family of six children. Her father, a professional musician, amused himself with painting when opportunity offered, and the child may have inherited her love for the beautiful from him.
The family exchequer not being adequate per capita, the ambitious girl had to leave school when only fourteen and begin to earn her own living. She was clerk for a wholesale house for a number of years, but while she was busy all through the day with the monotonous drudgery of a down-town office, her ambition and courage took her to the night school of the Art Institute with great regularity, until she found the double strain too great, and the art fervor had to wait. Not long, however, for the sincerity of the girl was such that she began to save from her modest salary, until she had a seemingly Carnegie foundation. But it served its purpose, for with it she was able to begin her career by studying for a time at Olivet College, Michigan, the drawing and painting she hungered for. Here, too, she made her first attempts at modeling. After her $265 fortune had gradually melted away, she came to Chicago in 1899, and began the serious study of sculpture, paying for her tuition by work in the Institute library at night. More than two years of study at the Art Institute were followed by teaching in the summer school. In 1901 Miss Longman's ambition took her to New York with just $40 in her pocket. Fortunately, she obtained work for a time in the studio of Herman A. MacNeil, and later, for a short time, assisted Isidore Konti. Although her most lavish dinner could be set down in her account book at fifteen cents, the forty dollars was on the vanishing page. At that critical, yes, tragic juncture, came an offer of work as assistant in the studio of Daniel C. French, today one of America's greatest sculptors. From that hour, in the congenial atmosphere of this kind and helpful artist's studio, the sky began to brighten. There she toiled for three years, the way becoming steadily pleasanter and easier, and in time the orders and work led to a studio of her own.
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