Early Life and Family
She was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1906 to a wealthy, highly educated assimilated Jewish family. Her mother, Laura Polanyi Striker, a historian, was the first woman to get a PhD from the University of Budapest. Laura's work on Captain John Smith's adventures in Hungary added fundamentally to our understanding and appreciation of his reliability as a narrator. Laura's brothers, Karl Polanyi, the sociologist and economist, and Michael Polanyi, the physical chemist and philosopher of science, are also very well known. Despite her family's intellectual prominence in the field of science, Eva Striker always felt a deep attraction towards art. At 17, Zeisel entered Budapest's Magyar Képzőművészeti Akadémia (Hungarian Royal Academy of Fine Arts) as a painter. However, to support her painting, she eventually decided to pursue a more practical profession and apprenticed herself to Jakob Karapancsik, the last pottery master in the medieval guild system. From him she learned ceramics from the ground up. After graduating as a journeyman she found work with German ceramic manufacturers.
Read more about this topic: Eva Zeisel
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or family:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“It is high time we realized that the havoc wrought in human life and ideals by a technological revolution and too long ignored has caught up with us.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“It is in the love of one’s family only that heartfelt happiness is known.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)