Spring Song

(1871- 1942) A sculptress best known for celebrity portraits of nineteenth-century men, Julia Wendt and her husband, William Wendt, were prominent in the Laguna Beach art colony in southern California. Julia Wendt was the twelfth child of Irish-Catholic parents in Apple River, Illinois and at age seventeen, she went to Chicago where she became one of Laredo Taft’s female assistants, known as the White Rabbits, during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. She studied with Taft for six years along with Bessie Vonnoh and Janet Scudder. She won a sculpture commission at the Illinois pavilion at the Chicago World’s Fair, and her work “Illinois Welcoming the Nations” was placed in the Illinois state capitol building in Springfield. In 1900, she completed a statue of James Monroe that is also installed at the capitol building. In 1906, after her marriage to Wendt, she left Chicago for California and in 1911, she began a commission of an eleven-foot high, three-figure allegory group for the rotunda of the Los Angeles County Museum. She chose to represent History, Science, and Art as draped goddesses with uplifted hands holding electrically lit globes. After her death, in the face of modernist art, the work was hidden from sight but later resurrected in 1980 with its own room for display.