Louis Rosenthal was born as Leon Chantel (Chanel) in Plungyon, Lithuania on February 20, 1888, and was the sixth child of seven children of Rebecca and Hyman Chatel. From his early childhood years he was known to go out into the forest and experiment with carving his first etchings into the bark of trees, and it was here that the mythological figures that will later be reflected in his miniature sculptures first came to life and captured his imagination. Early on he studied in the Yeshiva until he was old enough to enter his father’s milling business, but his artistic interests never faded. When he was 17 years old, Rosenthal received the attention of a teacher in a Viennese school of painting, who urged him to go to Berlin to get artistic training, where he stayed for several months. Then at the age of 19, and after the passing of his father, Rosenthal immigrated to the United States.

After a short stay in Birdsnest, Va., where his name was officially changed to Louis Rosenthal, he left for Baltimore, Md., where he was introduced to Ephraim Keyser, the head of the Rinehart School of Sculpture (now known as the Maryland Institute College of Art, MICA). He received a four year scholarship to the school, and during this time he won several prizes and began receiving recognition in Baltimore, Md. as a young talented sculptor. While pursuing his studies, Rosenthal met his future wife, Dorothy “Dolly” Rosenthal (Levin), and they married in 1917, the same year Louis Rosenthal became a citizen of the United States of America. After graduating from MICA, Rosenthal worked for jewelers and dental offices, working with settings and inlays, and around 1918 he started working with miniature sculptures when he was designing a bronze ring commissioned by opera singer, Enrico Caruso. After finishing this piece, Rosenthal worked on developing a method of casting tiny figures from wax into bronze himself as no foundry in the world could manage to work with figures so small. Between 1918 and 1924, he developed a process to do so, and sources say that in his excitement to rush home and tell his wife about it, he managed to destroy his newly created cast and lost the solution he had worked so hard to develop. It took him three months to rediscover it.

To make his miniature sculptures, Rosenthal started by carving the model out of black wax with a simple pearl-handled penknife, and he was known for not using a magnifying glass when working with his sculptures. The casting was done by hollow casting or the lost-wax casting process. This process involves coating the sculpted wax with a special solution and then evaporating the wax figure to create a mold which can then be used to create the sculpture. Rosenthal’s process was unknown until after his death in 1964 when a group of scientists at the Consolidated Dental Laboratories tested his process. Prevalent themes of his work are historical, mythological, biblical, satirical, and whimsical in nature.

His first success came about in 1925 with an exhibit held in a Fifth Avenue gallery in New York City, in which almost all of his 40 miniature sculptures were sold and an ensuing article was published in the New York Times. As the story goes, Rosenthal did not know about the success of his show until he saw his name in the newspaper. He did not have enough money to purchase the newspaper so he ran 38 blocks to the reading room of the New York Public Library to read the art critic’s review praising his work. Thereafter, museums and galleries in New York, Washington D.C., London, and Jerusalem exhibited his artworks, and his sculptures are now part of museum collections including the Smithsonian, the Jewish Museums of New York and Maryland, and the Louis Rosenthal Museum.

Besides exhibits of his work, Rosenthal also received notable commissions over the course of his artistic career. One of those commissions was for a memorial plaque for the late Governor Albert C. Ritchie in the summer of 1937, and other commissioned artworks included, “The Dawn of Maryland Freedom” and a gift to Lord Balfour, Prime Minister of England. The Royal Society of Miniature Painters, Sculptors and Gravers were so impressed by his work that they extended an invitation for him to join the society.

Louis Rosenthal passed away at John Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Md., in 1964 due to a heart attack. With a lively imagination and vast knowledge of history and mythology, Rosenthal drew on stories and characters from mythology, folklore, the Old Testament, and everyday life for the subjects of his sculptures. At his funeral Louis L. Kaplan, the head of the Baltimore Hebrew Institute gave his eulogy, and in it he states that Rosenthal may not have had a successful career financially, but he did make an impact on the people who saw his work.