Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 11.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

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[394] the art spirit, art taste, and the ability to purchase works of art exist as they cannot anywhere now in the impoverished South. Asking for bread, as our people do, how can Valentine offer them a stone! But his strong love for his ancestral soil holds him in Richmond, and hence he has not attained that national renown to which his remarkable merits entitle him.

His earliest masters were Hubard, whose fine reproductions in bronze of Houdon's statue of Washington are well known, and Oswald Heinrich, who had come from the centre of Saxon art, Dresden, where his father was private secretary to the picture-loving king. But the ambitious youth panted for such stimulus as could only be found beyond the seas, and consequently, in 1859, when he was just twenty years of age, he went abroad for study. His first point was Paris, where he became a pupil of Couture and learned to draw from the nude. Couture had been a student of Paul de la Roche, and was then in the height of his popularity. After remaining for some time under his instruction, he set out again for the goal of his desires. Italy, the shrine of all the arts. He lingered in intoxicated delight amid the galleries of Milan, Verona, Florence, Rome, going even as far south as Naples. He studied Michael Angelo and John of Bologna, and the splendid antique of the Vatican, and mulitudes of the old masters and the modern ones, until his whole nature was saturated, as it were, and he became restless to put to account the stores he was laying up. He returned to Florence and placed himself under the instruction of Bonauti, the friend of Canova and the pupil of Thorwaldsen.

The year after this we find the young artist at Dresden, with the view of becoming the pupil of Rietschel, the famous sculptor there. But he found that the grave had just closed over him; so he hastened on to Berlin, made a special art centre by the presence of such men as Rauch and Cornelius, and Kiss and Schadow and Wolff, all of whom with one exception are now among the dead. Valentine had seen Kiss's great work in bronze, The Amazon Attacked by a Tiger, and it had left such an impression as made him desirous of receiving instruction from him. On application to Kiss, however, he was refused, the old sculptor saying that he took no pupils. The young American was not easily daunted, and he pleaded so effectively that Kiss relaxed so far as to bid him return to him for his answer three weeks later. At the appointed hour, Valentine duly presented himself, and the result of the conference was that Kiss installed him in his atelier, and in a short time, through his diligence, skill, and gentleness,