Her childhood in an isolated Kansas settlement was barren of educational facilities save when a travelling teacher appeared to establish classes for a few weeks while resting and preparing to continue his travels. Her introduction to good poetry and music came through such agencies. A guitar peddler with instruments, instruction books, and the good will to teach all purchasers to play found a willing pupil in the eleven-year-old Vinnie, whose father bought his first instrument. Guitar sales flourished. The supply was exhausted, but the little girl was the only one who mastered the teacher’s method and was able to pick out tunes from the little book. This was the beginning of a musical career in which, as composer and interpreter, she was considered a genius in the year she was in college.
Photos. by Brady
MRS. JAMES A. GARFIELD
The vicissitudes of fortune brought the Ream family to Washington at the opening of the Civil War, and the little girl at the age of thirteen had to become the mainstay for a time, filling a copyist’s position in the Post Office at fifty dollars a month.
Her first visit to the studio of Clark Mills, the sculptor engaged to make a bust of her for the Christian College of Missouri, where she had been for a year a prize pupil, changed the objective of her life from music to art. As she watched the artist reproducing her own features in clay, the conviction burst upon her that she too could command her fingers in such expression, and she exclaimed, “Oh, I know I could do that!”
Amused at her girlish presumption, the artist handed her a bit of clay, to try. In a few minutes, he was amazed to see a striking likeness of himself taking form under her small fingers. Instantly, he and those with him in the studio realized that this undersized girl of thirteen was a genius of no mean order. Mills accordingly offered her instruction, sending her home with some clay and a little statuette to copy. The duplicate made in a few hours convinced her family that the little girl had discovered her real life work.
As her work progressed and her skill developed, the Postmaster General permitted her to complete her daily quota of work in the mornings so that she might have the necessary afternoon light for her art.
A bust of President Lincoln modelled from memory brought her an interview with him, and her story of her struggle to help her family won his consent for her to come to the White House for sittings. For five months this girl, now seventeen, made her daily trip to the President’s office to make her sketches. Her last sitting was on the day preceding his assassination. From her drawings, she made a bust of such remarkable likeness that she was induced to enter the competition for the statue of Lincoln for the Capitol for which Congress appropriated $15,000, and won.
The contract was hers. She had won above the nation’s leading sculptors. With her advance payment she established herself and her parents in a studio in Rome to study and supervise the cutting of the marble for the statue. Three years later, she returned to begin the work in an empty committee room assigned to her use, under the inspiration and criticism of Abraham Lincoln’s associates.