WOMAN IN ART
suavely explain, 'Yes, they do that in America.' 'But to work like a man! Dio Mio'!"
Those people have yet to learn,
"Blessed are they that work,
For they shall inherit the earth,
In the dawning day."
A friend of the artist wrote of the beginning of her work on the East Side. It was printed in a supplement years ago and was to be relegated to the barrel of waste paper when the writer rescued the yellow paper just now, and from it makes this quotation:
"A tea-wagon, a rag-picker, the janitor's daughter, and her cat, all are omitted from the brief "Who's Who" narrative of the life of Abastenia Eberle, sculptor. Yet they were as definite factors in her career as a course at Princeton was to Woodrow Wilson's, or a singing teacher in Caruso's. They helped to direct the subsequent course of her life, and to give this country one of its most definitely American plastic artists.
"A friend of Miss Eberle's gave her the tea-wagon. The friend was going away, and the tea-wagon was a mark of appreciation of the many late afternoon hours she had spent in the sculptor's studio with congenial friends. The tea-wagon was as revealing to Miss Eberle as a horoscope. It showed her that she was in danger of settling down to sculp for an audience that liked tea and cake with its art.
"The next day she went down to the East Side and tramped through the swarming streets till she came to the type-swarm she liked best—the massive, sculptural, Russian Jews. It was Madison Street, and she rented a floor in an old-fashioned house, with a dentist on the floor below and a tailor on the ground floor. There were daily visits for a short time, superintending painting and cleaning, and then Miss Eberle moved in—without the tea-wagon. She had set apart one room for the children's playroom, put in some cheap toys, to inveigle some neighboring children. But little Becky Ravinsky anticipated her plan and became part of her life history that first day. The children came, and Miss Eberle displayed the playroom and toys, and said it would be open after school hours and all day Saturdays. No further advertising was needed.
"Now in that neighborhood people live twelve hundred to the block, so children are not scarce. They flocked in far beyond the capacity of the playroom at first, but in time settled down to about twenty-four steadies. Why?
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