18. Bird Girl by Sylvia Shaw Judson was originally commissioned by the Ryseron family of Chicago, Illinois as a garden sculpture for their summer home in Massachusetts. The statue, completed in 1936, is the likeness of a nine year old girl who posed for Judson as she sculpted the piece. The bowls held in each of the statue’s hands were intended to hold food or water for birds. Originally exhibited as Girl with Bowls at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1938, the piece was also exhibited as Fountain Figure, Standing Figure, and Peasant Girl. The statue was first called Bird Girl by Judson in her 1967 book For Gardens and Other Places. A bronze cast of the statue was purchased by the Trosdal family of Savannah, Georgia and installed in their family plot in Bonaventure Cemetery where it remained largely unnoticed for over 50 years. In 1994, a photo of the statue taken by photographer Jack Leigh was used as the cover image for John Berendt’s book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was published that same year and later adapted for Clint Eastwood’s 1997 film of the same name. The book became an instant success, and soon the statue was receiving thousands of visitors. Due to concerns over the amount of traffic at the grave site, the Trosdal family had the statue removed from the cemetery and relocated to the Telfair Museums in Savannah, where the piece is now on public display. In 1995, Slyvia’s daughter Alice Judson Hayes had an additional bronze copy of Bird Girl made and installed at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest. Hayes held the copyright for Bird Girl until her death in 2006, upon which the copyright was passed to her daughter, painter Francie Shaw.Sylvia Shaw Judson was the daughter of prominent architect Howard Van Doren Shaw and poet and playwright Frances Wells Shaw. She was born in 1897 in Chicago. That same year, her father purchased 50 acres of land on Green Bay Road on which he built the family’s summer home, which he named Ragdale. Judson spent the majority of her childhood summers at Ragdale, where she and her sisters would recite poems and perform plays written by their mother. She enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and graduated in 1918, then studied under Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. She married an attorney named Clay Judson in 1921 and gave birth to their daughter Alice the following year. When Alice was seven years old, she posed for the creation of her mother’s sculpture Little Gardener, which was awarded the coveted Logan Prize in 1929 and later selected for the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden at the White House in 1964. Judson had her first solo show in 1938, which was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and then circulated to art museums in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. In 1942, the Judsons made Ragdale their year-round residence, and Sylvia became an involved member of the Quaker group the Society of Friends. She won a competition in 1957 for a monument to Mary Dyer, a Quaker martyr hanged by Puritans in 1660, and the sculpture was then installed on the grounds of the Massachusetts State House in Boston. After her husband Clay’s death in 1960, she remarried to Sidney Haskins, and the two moved to a Quaker retirement home near Philadelphia in 1971. She would sometimes return to Ragdale to work in her studio, and she died there in 1978. She is now buried at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.