THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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You will rise at half-past six on Monday morning, and breakfast at seven, so that you may be at the great school belonging to Julian or Colarossi or Delacluse before eight, and so get your choice of a seat for the week, late comers having to take what is left. At twelve, having worked four hours from the living model, you will go to a queer little restaurant, the outside of which gives you a shudder, but which serves you a fairly good meal, and where you meet the other students. You will spend the after­noon either in painting or modeling in your own studio or in going to the Louvre or Luxembourg galleries; or, if it is spring, at the salons, and you can either take your work to a great artist and get his criticism upon it, or, if it is sculpture, he will come to your little studio, and glorify it with his presence, and say enough in ten minutes to make you wish you had ten pairs of hands and five heads, as one set is not nearly enough for you. In the summer you will go with other students into Brittany or Hol ­land, or where you will, and study outdoors—by the sea or in the country—and have wonderful adventures. You will return to the city in the fall, full of new enthusiasm, and feeling more than ever the value of continual study from the fine living models, who pose so much better than the peasants and country people, who do not see why you can not take their pictures in three seconds, as if you were a Kodac. Let us go into some of the studios of last winter and see some of their workings. You are all familiar with the MacMonnies Fountain in front of the Administration Building,* and as I had the pleasure of watching its progress during several stages of the work, a few words in regard to it may not be amiss.

The sculptor, though still a young man, has worked very hard for years. When he received the commission of this fountain, he expressed his first idea with regard to its general arrangement by making a tiny sketch model in clay. This was followed by clay figures made carefully from life, and sometimes under difficulties; for instance, the model who was posing swayed constantly out of the proper position, being too indolent or careless to remain in it. The sculptor calmly went to work and made a wonderful trapeze arrangement of ropes, so that arms and legs were held in position, and where that was not sufficient, added a sharp point or two near the knee and elbow, to give a warning prick, and remind the sitter of his or her duty to keep still.

You doubtless all know that the fine decorations on the north end of the interior of this Woman’s Building that we are in was made by Mrs. MacMonnies, the wife of the sculptor. I also saw this when its author w'as working upon it from a scaffold so high over my head that I did not at first know she was in the great studio.

Their studios are a constant resort of artists and students of all sorts, as they are young and sympathetic and remember their own student days and the immense bene­fit that such meeting-grounds are to artistic natures. A little way off is a street called “the street of the mill of butter,” and through a little iron grating we enter a court and ring a bell. The answer to it is a door opening and a figure appearing with hands covered with clay. It is that of Douglas Tilden, the deaf and dumb sculptor from Cal­ifornia, an excellent artist as you may easily see by his w'orks: “The Base-Ball Man ” and “Indian Bear Hunt ” in the Fine Arts Building. We conversed with him in writ­ing and we look with interest on his statue at which he is now working. It is called “A Wounded Foot-Ball Player,” and is a group of three figures full of life and expres­sion. His little den upstairs, furnished as a sitting-room, is strewn with manuscript, and we learned that it is a magazine story. Another sculptor that 1 met in Paris is Miss Matthews, who has only one arm, and yet, who has managed to do better work than some of the fraternity who have all their members. I think such instances should convince all Philistines that artists, if they be truly such, may be bereft of almost any­thing except their heads and yet succeed in their work, for the spirit of a true artist can never be wholly suppressed.

P'or many years, the only way by which artists met each other was at their own stu­dios, but now there are two clubs of American students, one for men and one for women, the latter growing out of the work of Mr. and Mrs. Newell who established it. It has

♦Columbian Exposition.