The following biography is from Greta Elena Couper, the great great-granddaughter of sculptor Thomas Ball. She is a writer and educator in Los Angeles, California, and concentrates her research on 19th-century art history and the psychology of travel.

Thomas Ball, Boston sculptor, was a member of the more than one hundred expatriate artists living in Italy in the nineteenth century. He worked in the realistic style and was most successful in marble sculpture and heroic bronze statues, but was also accomplished as a portrait painter and musician. His best known monuments are the equestrian George Washington in the Boston Public Garden, the heroic statue Daniel Webster in New York's Central Park, and the Lincoln Emancipation Group in B...