Leonard Wells Volk

Leonard Wells Volk 1828-95, American sculptor, b. Wellstown (now Wells), N.Y. In 1848 he went to St. Louis, where he studied drawing and worked at funerary sculpture. With the aid of Stephen A. Douglas he studied in Rome, and in 1857 he opened a studio in Chicago. He closely studied both Lincoln and Douglas during their famous debates and also made a life mask of Lincoln and casts of his hands. A leading figure in the Chicago art world, Volk was active in founding the Chicago Academy of Design. His colossal Douglas monument is in Chicago, and statues of Lincoln and Douglas are in the capitol at Springfield, Ill. He executed many portrait busts and military monuments.

Hessing, Leonard (1931– ). Australian painter, born at Chernovtsy (Czernowitz), which at the time was part of Romania (it is now in the Ukraine). He studied painting under Léger in Paris, 1950–1, then moved to Australia to join his parents, who had recently emigrated there. He took a degree in architecture at Sydney University in 1958. In the 1960s he established a reputation as one of Australia's leading abstract painters, working in a vigorous but sophisticated Abstract Expressionist vein.

His mother, Perle Hessing (1908– ), took up art in the 1960s, encouraged by Leonard, and became a well-known naive painter. Later both settled in Britain.