William West Durant

Born in 1850, William West Durant was the eldest child of Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Clark Durant. In 1863, Mrs. Durant left New York with her two children and spent the next thirteen years in Europe, leaving her husband behind to attend to his flourishing railroad business. In Florence she commissioned Hiram Powers to create portraits of herself and her children, and ordered several replicas of other statues. The Durants were slow in paying the artist, and he told them that “I shall put the models of your busts on a separate shelf with the names attached and mark that shelf Delinquents . . . You can become famous if you like.”