Excerpt from A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-Seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life Abbatt, Miss Agnes Dean, artist, born in New York City. A3rd June. 1847. She still resides in her native city. Her paternal ancestors were English, and she is of French Huguenot descent on her mother's side. Her great-grandfather and his family came from England to this country in the latter part of the last century. They settled in what is now Pleasant Valley, Dutchess county, N. Y., where D. Abbart, the father of Agnes, was born. He passed his life in business in Poughkeepsie, Philadelphia and New York. Miss Abbatt's grandmother, Mrs. Dean, an English woman, was an art amateur of unusual talent and accomplishments. Of her children, nearly all possessed the talent for painting, but of all the descendants Agnes alone has adopted art as a profession. She showed in early childhood a marked talent for drawing. But it was not till 1873 that she took up the study of art as a profes sion. In that year she entered the Cooper Union art-school. She won a medal for a head of Ajax in the first year of her studies, and on the merit of that achievement she was admitted to the art school of the National Academy of Design in New York. So decided was her progress that, at the end of the first year in that institution her first full length drawing was one of those selected for exhi bitiou. As it was not her intention to become a figure-painter, she left the Academy and devoted herself to the study of landscape painting. That branch of art she studied for several years under R. Swain Gifl'ord, N. A, and james D. Smillie, N. A., constantly showing new powers and making rapid progress. At the same time she was gratify ing her tastes in another direction, and she won distinction as a water - colorist and also as a flower painter. Her first pictures, two panels of flowers, were shown in the exhibition of the Brooklyn Art Club in 1875, where they attracted much atten tion and found purchasers. Her next picture. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.