"Dr. William Rimmer was well known in art circles in Boston for the eighteen years preceding his death in 1879, as a remarkable lecturer upon art anatomy, a skillful delineator of its forms, as the sculptor of several statues and busts, and as a man who had painted much without establishing a reputation as a painter. For four years he was also known in New York as the director of the School of Design for Women at the Cooper Institute.
Rimmer's father belonged to a branch of the one of the royal families of France. Born during the revolution of 1789, he was reared from his infancy in the utmost seclusion in England, in the home of an English family. Distinction, with royal favor, was almost within his possession, when political and family complications suddenly arose, and the young man found his inheritance wrongfully taken from him, and he soon discovered, too, that neither his birthright nor name would avail him anything in the scale of justice.
He sailed for Nova Scotia where he landed in 1818. Determined to be forever done with his old life, he abandoned even his name, concealing his identity under the name 'Thomas Rimmer,' and selecting the trade of a shoemaker as being the means of earning a livelihood which would be likely to bring him least in contact with his fellowmen. Soon after his arrival, he sent for his wife, Mrs. Mary Rimmer, an Irish lady, and for his only child, William, born in Liverpool just two years before.
All that the father had suffered had a scarcely less direct effect upon the son that its actual experience would have had, and, while still a boy in years, William was in feeling a wronged and saddened man."
To be continued
(Excerpts from "The Art Life of William Rimmer: Sculptor, Painter, and Physician" by Truman Howe Bartlett.)
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