A SUCCESSFUL MAN.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVI, Issue XV, 11 April 1896, Page 425

A SUCCESSFUL MAN.

Bertel Thorwaldsen, the sculptor, began life under adverse circumstances. His father drank, his mother was an ignorant peasant, and neither of them could give the boy the slightest advancement in life. His interest in wood-carving seemed to bring out the only signs of intelligence he ever showed at this early age. As one writer says, like Claude Lorraine, who could never be taught to make a tart —though his father was a pastry cook—nor to read a book, he was quite dense to the charms of reading. Yet he could carve wood, and when he was eleven years old a friend procured for him admission to the Danish Academy of the Fine Arts, and there he made marvellous progress. At the age of seventeen he won a small silver medal awarded by the academy as a prize for drawing and modelling, and about that time he was required by the laws of the Lutheran Church to present himself for confirmation. The chaplain, however, in examining him, found him so deplorably ignorant of the simplest book-learning that he was about to send him to the lower form, when he happened to ask : ‘ Was the student who gained the silver medal your brother, or any relation to you ?’ ‘ It was I,’ responded Bertel, confused ; and the good clergyman’s tone and look changed at once. ‘ Herre Thorwaldsen,’ said he, respectfully, you may go into the upper form.’ In the years of his prosperity Thorwaldsen used to declare that he had never felt such elation as at the first use of that respectful title. His fellow students at the academy remembered him as very silent and shy ; a youth who cared little for their sports and escapades, but who worked while they were

talking, and who generally finished his preliminary sketch while they were deciding how a subject should be treated. Yet he was not self-confident, and an approaching contest for a gold medal filled him with such alarm that his fellows had only to say, ‘ Thorwaldsen remember the examination !’ to set him trembling.

On the appointed day he appeared with the rest, but when the subject was given out, ‘ Heliodorus Expelled from the Temple,’ panic seized him, and he rose and fled. On the way out of the building he met a friend, who persuaded him to return, and he won the prize. The story of his life is full of alleviating incidents of high attainment and idleness, and it was only after he made a visit to Rome that he awakened to the true meaning of an artist’s life. Thereafter he lived on the full flood of public favour as very few men have done. Success attended him daily, and to the very end.