Sylvia Shaw Judson unknowingly created the 'Midnight' icon

This is the woman who sculpted the statue that was bought by the family who put it in the graveyard that attracted the photographer who snapped the picture that was put on the book that became a best-seller.

Such is the unlikely story of Sylvia Shaw Judson, the artist who created Bird Girl. The daughter of an architect and a writer, Judson was born in 1897 and raised in Lake Forest, Ill.

She was an artist from early on and, though little known now outside of the Chicago area, an artist of some note in her day. Before she died in 1978, Judson saw her work exhibited in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and in New York's Whitney Museum of Modern Art.

Bird Girl was produced in 1938 as a garden statue. Knowing that mass production reduced the value of art, Judson had only three copies produced. One sits in a forest preserve near Lake Forest, another belongs to a family in Lake Forest, and the third was purchased by Lucy Boyd Trosdal of Savannah.

Trosdal, who called the statue ''Little Wendy,'' put it at the family gravesite in Bonaventure Cemetery. It stood in solitude for 50 years before Jack Leigh photographed it for the cover of ''Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.''

Gene Downs, Savannah Morning News