Museum Collections

Fidelia Marshall Lamson was a pupil of the promising young pianist Richard Hoffman; the two fell in love and, defying society and their parents, eloped. Mrs. Hoffman became the mother of four children. She was a woman of culture and intellect, and her daughter Malvina, the sculptor, in Heads and Tales (1936, p. 52) recalled the time when she and her mother lived in Paris: "During my student years in Paris my mother . . . knew all my friends and quickly endeared herself to them by her sympathy and quiet charm. Having been born and brought up for the first years of her life in Paris, French was like her native language. . . . [Her] breadth of literary and musical interests soon gathered many friends about us. In our modest little studio there was always a piano, and many were the Bohemian musical evenings that we enjoyed there."