Early Life and Family
Winnaretta Singer was the twentieth of the 24 children of Isaac Merritt Singer. Her mother was his Parisian-born second wife, Isabella Eugenie Boyer, who was possibly the model for Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty. Winnaretta was born in Yonkers, New York. After the outbreak of American Civil War, the Singer family moved to Paris, where they remained until the Franco-Prussian War. The family then settled in England, first in London, and then Paignton, Devon; there, Isaac Singer built Oldway Mansion, a 115-room palace modeled on the Petit Trianon at Versailles, which he named "The Wigwam."
Read more about this topic: Winnaretta Singer
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or family:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“Blackmail is one of the great pastimes of family life.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)