VIIIAUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS

Born in Dublin, Ireland, 1848Died in Cornish, New Hampshire, 1907

In a little house in Dublin, Ireland, on March 1, 1848, was born Augustus Saint-Gaudens. There was nothing in the humble surroundings which first greeted his eyes to mark the baby as in any way different from the many other babies who may have been born on the same first day of March in the ancient Irish city.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, however, inherited from his father and mother something far greater than wealth or name, for in their sturdy, honest blood he found that indefinable thing called “character,” which, throughout his life, led him steadily forward along the straight path to fame and honor. From his parents he also inherited the qualities which are inherent in a romantic people; for his father was born in France, in the little village of Aspet at the foot of the Pyrenees, and his mother, whose maiden name was Mary McGuiness, gave him the love of the beautiful which belongs to Ireland. But perhaps, after all, his parents gave him a like inheritance, for Ireland is an old nation into which in centuries past has been infused the blood of the proudest families of France—Irish by birth and French by inheritance, he might be called.

The elder Saint-Gaudens was a shoemaker, and he had met the mother of the future Augustus in the shoe store for which he made shoes and where she did the binding of slippers. When Augustus was but a few months old his parents emigrated to the United States and in the month of September in the year of his birth he landed in the city of Boston, a place which in later years became deeply identified with his activities.

From Boston the little family proceeded to New York, where Bernard Saint-Gaudens, the father, set up his small business and secured humble lodging nearby for his family. And here the young Augustus made the beginning of his conscious life, in which, of early memories, most vivid were the “delightful reminiscences of the smell of cake in the bakery at the corner of the street, and of the stewed peaches of the German family in the same house.”

Above the door of the shop hung the sign “French Ladies’ Boots and Shoes”; and within, the shoemaker, with his “wonderfully complex mixture of French accent and Irish brogue,” varied his occupation of making shoes with endless duties which he undertook as the organizer and leading figure in several societies which flourished in the French colony of the city. Customers came readily to the little shop, for its proprietor was an able workman, despite certain agreeable eccentricities, and the business, growing steadily, provided an adequate, if simple, upbringing for Augustus and his two brothers.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens(Signature)

Many are the memories of those early days, memories of a wholesome and normal boyhood. There are memories of fires, of street-fights with boys of other neighborhoods, of school-days, of a never-to-be-forgotten excursion to the country, of the delight of his first reading of “Robinson Crusoe,” and of the famous actress Rachel playing “Virginia” in Niblo’s Garden. And there are memories of boyhood loves, memories all that “pass across the field of my vision like ships that appear through the mist for a moment and disappear.”

With the early end of his school days Augustus turned to the actual earning of his daily bread. He was thirteen years old. To his father’s question as to what kind of work appealed most strongly to him he had answered, “I should like it if I could do something which would help me to be an artist.” It was a decision that must have seemed strange to the father, who perhaps had seen in the boy a possible assistant in his growing business; but wisely he respected the desire that Augustus expressed, and a few weeks later the boy was apprenticed to a Frenchman named Avet, the first stone-cameo cutter in America.

A cameo is a fine relief of a human head, or the head of an animal, cut in a stone or shell, often so done as to show the design in a layer of one color with another color as a background. The stones, which were usually amethysts or malachite, were at that period extremely fashionable, and were worn in rings, or scarf-pins, or breast-pins by men and women. The work was fine and required skill and patience and artistic ability; so for a long time Augustus was limited to thepreparation of the stones, which Avet would finish and later sell to the leading jewelers of the city.

Avet was a hard taskmaster and the monotonous labor over the whirring lathe was irksome to the red-blooded boy, who looked up from the spinning-wheel at the white clouds sailing across the little window above him and heard the rumble of wheels and the hum of life in the distant street. But in his few hours of leisure there were glimpses of stirring events never to be forgotten. There was the excitement attending the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency, “Honest Abe, the Rail-Splitter.” There was the recruiting of troops for the great Civil War which for four long years racked the land. And later, from the window in front of his lathe, Saint-Gaudens watched the volunteers from New England as they tramped down Broadway, singing “John Brown’s Body” as they marched.

Day after day Saint-Gaudens ground and turned the stones on his lathe, and all day long he listened to the voice of Avet, scolding and swearing as he worked. One day came the breaking-point. At noon the boy had quietly eaten his luncheon from the little box which he brought each morning with him to his work. Some crumbs had fallen on the floor, and Avet, seeing them, burst into a fury and discharged him on the spot. Without comment he folded up his overalls, left the shop, and going at once to his father’s store, explained exactly what had occurred. Within a few minutes Avet followed, apologetic and promising even more money if the boy would return. Withouthesitation Saint-Gaudens refused, and in later life he often recalled his father’s “proud smile” as he made his decision.

There is credit in sticking to a hard job, and there is equal credit in a manly refusal to continue to work under intolerable conditions. Saint-Gaudens’s act brought its own reward, for his next employer, Mr. Jules le Brethon, a shell-cameo cutter, was a man unlike Avet in every particular, and it was through this new connection that the path to Saint-Gaudens’s career as a sculptor was opened to him.

With his characteristic foresight in availing himself of every opportunity, the boy had early begun to devote his evenings to the study of drawing in the free classes at the Cooper Institute. Every day at six he left his work, and after a hurried supper, hastened to his classroom. He was appreciative of the great opportunity which the school afforded him, and he threw himself with all his soul into his work. “I became a terrific worker, toiling every night until eleven o’clock after the class was over. Indeed, I became so exhausted with the confining work of cameo-cutting by day and drawing at night, that in the morning mother literally dragged me out of bed, pushed me over to the washstand, where I gave myself a cat’s lick somehow or other, drove me to the seat at the table, administered my breakfast, and tumbled me downstairs out into the street, where I awoke.”

When the courses at the Cooper Union were finally accomplished, Saint-Gaudens took up new night work at the National Academy of Design, and it was herethat his first appreciation of the antique came to him, and his first practice in drawing from the nude—training so fundamental for his great work in coming years.

Early in the year 1867 came another turning-point in his life. Ever since he had first begun to work, Saint-Gaudens had been giving his wages to his father to pay his share of the family expenses. And now the father, realising that the boy’s earnestness and ability were deserving of every opportunity which he could afford, made the offer of a trip to Europe, where he might see the art of the older civilizations and return to the United States broadened by his experience and observations.

Saint-Gaudens was nineteen years old. His father had paid for his passage in the steerage, and in his pocket were a hundred dollars which had been saved out of his wages. Arriving in Paris in a “mixed state of enthusiasm and collapse,” he spent a few days visiting in the household of an uncle, and then began his search of employment at cameo-cutting and of admission to the School of Fine Arts. Work was soon found in the establishment of an Italian. But entrance to the school was a more difficult proposition, and in order that no time should be wasted while he was waiting, he enrolled in a modeling school, working there mornings and nights and supporting himself on what he earned at cameo-cutting in the afternoon.

These were days and nights of almost superhuman exertion, but at the end of a year the desired admission to the school was obtained, and his real educationbegan. It is customary for a student at the Beaux-Arts to select the master in whose atelier he wishes to study, and Saint-Gaudens selected Jouffroy, whose pupils in the preceding years had been particularly successful in capturing most of the prizes which were offered by the school.

Here Saint-Gaudens formed several friendships which endured throughout his life, and here also he began to mingle more widely with the men in the great world about him, although his time was far too occupied for more than an occasional hour or two of relaxation. “My ambition was of such a soaring nature, and I was so tremendously austere, that I had the deepest scorn of the ordinary amusements of the light opera, balls and what not.” And yet, when he did play, his play was of the hardest. He was active beyond measure, and it is doubtless to the hours of hard physical exercise which he got at night in the gymnasium and the swimming-baths, that he owed the health which gave him the endurance necessary for his long hours in the classroom. Occasionally, walking trips, with one or two companions, gave well-deserved vacations—trips from which the walkers returned tired and penniless, but inspired by the beauty of nature in the pleasant French countryside and thrilled with the stupendous grandeur of the Alpine scenery.

But now, in the year 1870, the dark clouds of the Franco-Prussian War suddenly gathered. War was declared. The streets of Paris were congested with shouting, marching crowds. The enlistment placeswere filled with men joining the colors. To the young American the problem of his own line of action seemed difficult to decide. Everything within him urged him to enlist under the flag of France. But he was a citizen of another land, and aged parents awaited his return. He decided to withhold his decision. Once, indeed, he returned to Paris from Limoges fixed in his purpose to join his French companions; but there he found a letter from his mother, so pathetic that he reluctantly abandoned his intention, returned to Limoges, and a few months later started for Rome.

After the cold, gray months of a Paris winter, and the misery and suffering of the war, the glowing warmth and beauty of the Holy City exhilarated and exalted him. “It was as if a door had been thrown wide open to the eternal beauty of the classical.” Here, living almost in poverty, he continued the work so well begun in Paris. Here, also, he began the statue of Hiawatha, “pondering, musing in the forest, on the welfare of his people”—the first of the long list of world-recognized masterpieces which the strenuous labor of his life produced. So poor, indeed, was Saint-Gaudens at this time, that it was only through the kindness of an American, who advanced him the money to cast the figure, that he was able to complete the work. For this same gentleman Saint-Gaudens modeled busts of his two daughters, and through him he also received a commission for copies of the busts of Demosthenes and Cicero.

In Rome Saint-Gaudens also first made the acquaintance of Dr. Henry Shiff, a comrade whosefriendship lasted throughout his life. Shiff was considerably the senior of Saint-Gaudens, but his deep appreciation of art and literature, and his frank, friendly nature endeared him to the young and struggling sculptor, and gave him the inspiration that is always found in the true appreciation of a loyal friend.

In 1872 Saint-Gaudens returned to New York; but his stay was brief, for he was eager to return to Italy for a few years more before definitely establishing himself in the United States. While in New York, much work was accomplished, but little of it should be included in a list of his works, for in the main it consisted of jobs of one sort or another necessary to earn the money which his living required. Here, however, he began his bust of Senator William M. Evarts, one of the foremost orators in the United States, and, during the years 1877 to 1881, Secretary of State in the administration of President Hayes. Then, also, he received a number of other commissions for busts and, of particular importance, a commission for a figure of Silence to be placed in a Masonic building in New York. It was a sudden and bewildering amount of work for the young sculptor, and it brought vividly to him, after his struggling years of poverty in Europe, a realization of the appreciation and reward which the United States so freely offered.

In 1875 Augustus Saint-Gaudens returned again to the United States, but this time to take his place as a full-fledged sculptor. Behind him were years of hard but fruitful experience. From the long period at which he had worked at his cameo-cutting he haddeveloped a keen eye and a sure hand with his tools. From Paris and Rome he had obtained the practice which he required in actual work from the human figure, and from Rome in particular he had learned “what to leave untouched” and had acquired “an ability to choose his subjects from among the important figures of the moment, and then to give his best efforts to transforming them into vital and eternal symbols.”

On his arrival in New York he rented a small studio in an old building, and was soon intensively occupied in a life in which modeling, teaching, and studying filled the long hours, and carried on often far into the night. Dark and depressing seemed the New York winter after the warmth and color of Italy; and to bring back more vividly the memory of the tinkling, splashing fountains that played in the Roman sunshine, he would turn on the water in the little wash-basin in his studio and let the gentle sound carry his thoughts back to the gardens of Rome.

But now came two commissions which left no opportunity for thoughts of anything but the work in hand. From Governor Dix of New York came a commission for a statue of Robert Richard Randall, a wealthy citizen of New York City in the early years of the nineteenth century, who had left his fortune for the founding of the Sailors’ Snug Harbor, on Staten Island, a home for aged deep-sea sailormen. At the same time he obtained a commission for the statue of Admiral David G. Farragut,—the first Admiral of the United States Navy, and the hero of Mobile Bay,—whichstands in Madison Square, New York. The importance of these commissions did much to raise the spirits and fire the ambition of Saint-Gaudens, and at the same time the constantly increasing friendships which he was forming helped him to find the happiness of congenial comradeship which his nature sought. “There is no doubt,” he has written, “that my intimacy with John LaFarge has been a spur to higher endeavor”; and there were others who gave him similar inspiration by their warm appreciation of his ambitions.

It was in the year 1877 that Saint-Gaudens took a principal part in the founding of the Society of American Artists. The establishment of this society was an important milestone in the progress of American art, for with it came a vital change in American painting and sculpture. Previously, art in the United States had been more or less burdened with conventions and a dull technique. But this stagnant state now became stirred and freshened by the flood of a new generation of artists. Such men as Saint-Gaudens, Eastman Johnson, John LaFarge, Winslow Homer, and John S. Sargent began to remonstrate against the things that were. These men and their fellows had felt abroad the new movement in artistic appreciation. It was their desire to give to America this new and virile expression, and in spite of the opposition of the conservatists of the established school,—the “old-timers,”—the new society received a welcome and became a constantly increasing factor and force in the development of American art.

A year was now spent in the modeling of a high bas-relief depicting the “Adoration of the Cross by Angels,” which was to form the principal part of the interior decorations of St. Thomas’s Church in New York, which were being designed by Mr. John LaFarge. This was important work and added greatly to Saint-Gaudens’s reputation; but only the memory of its beauty remains, for the church was later destroyed by fire.

In 1878 Saint-Gaudens again visited Paris, but this time his work and study held him there for three years. In a quiet studio which he hired in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, work was begun on the Farragut statue, and also on a series of figures which were designed to ornament a mausoleum which Governor Morgan of Connecticut had commissioned him to execute. It is a strange coincidence that the angels for the Morgan tomb were later destroyed by fire, as were the angels of St. Thomas’s Church.

“In the years I passed this time in Paris there was little of the adventurous swing of life that pervaded my previous struggles.” Work on his commissions almost wholly occupied him. There were, however, occasional excursions, and the presence of two friends, Stanford White and McKim, who were already winning their reputation as brilliant New York architects, did much to break the tedium of his work.

The Farragut statue was finally completed, and on the afternoon of a beautiful day in May, 1881, it was unveiled to the eyes of the public. In his “Reminiscences” Saint-Gaudens described this memorableoccasion: “These formal unveilings of monuments are impressive affairs and variations from the toughness that pervades a sculptor’s life. For we constantly deal with practical problems, with moulders, contractors, derricks, stone-men, ropes, builders, scaffoldings, marble assistants, bronze-men, trucks, rubbish-men, plasterers, and what-not else, all the while trying to soar into the blue.—But if managed intelligently there is a swing to unveilings, and the moment when the veil drops from the monument certainly makes up for many of the woes that go towards the creating of the work. On this special occasion Mr. Joseph H. Choate delivered the oration. The sailors who assisted added to the picturesqueness of the procession. The artillery placed in the park, back of the statue, was discharged. And when the figure in the shadow stood unveiled, and the smoke rolled up into the sunlight upon the buildings behind it, the sight gave an impression of dignity and beauty that it would take a rare pen to describe.”

During the year 1877 Saint-Gaudens was married to Augusta F. Homer of Boston. Recognition had come to his work; his professional future seemed assured. Now, by this happy marriage, domestic tranquillity and congenial companionship were added.

On his return from Europe Saint-Gaudens took a studio on Thirty-Sixth Street in New York, and here were begun the Sunday afternoon concerts which soon became celebrated because of the literary men and artists who gathered there, and invitations were eagerly sought and highly prized. But in 1885 Saint-Gaudensmoved from the city and established his family in an old Colonial house at Cornish, New Hampshire. “I had been a boy of the streets and sidewalks all my life,” he says, “but during this first summer in the country, it dawned on me seriously how much there was outside of my little world.” Here was open country, a land of green hills and sky, a place where the man to whom beauty was a living thing might find widening inspiration.

Of the many monuments which Saint-Gaudens created there are five which commemorate great heroes of the Civil War. The monument of Admiral Farragut has been mentioned; standing in the heart of the country’s greatest city, it carries daily to the thousands who pass an unconscious inspiration—as though treading the swinging deck of his flagship, the Admiral seems to look forward with a grim determination, inflexible, indomitable—a man.

The Shaw memorial was undertaken in 1884. The second of this historic series, Saint-Gaudens expected to complete it within a comparatively short time; but it was not until 1897 that the memorial was unveiled in Boston. Robert Gould Shaw was a young Bostonian who was killed in action while leading his regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts—a regiment of colored men led by white officers. The memorial is in the form of a large bas-relief. Although unfortunately placed, it is one of Saint-Gaudens’s most highly considered works. Across the relief the colored troops march to the drum beat; there is the rhythm of a passing regiment and a martial animation, but over all isa sense of melancholy; in the faces of the soldiers, the tense look of anticipation of the impending battle. Occupying the centre of the panel, Shaw rides beside his men, an expression of sadness on his youthful face. Above the scene floats a figure to which the master gave no name, but which his interpreters and pupils have called Fame and Death.

During the early nineties Saint-Gaudens produced two more statues, both of which have been placed in the city of Chicago. In the equestrian monument to General Logan, Saint-Gaudens gave an indication of the greater statue, that of General Sherman, which was soon to follow. In the Logan monument he found a subject susceptible of broad interpretation. The general, mounted on a spirited charger, rides with the air of a conqueror. There is the “smell of the battlefield” in his face. The body seems a living thing, moving flesh and blood are incased in the wind-blown uniform.

But in his statue of Abraham Lincoln, Saint-Gaudens reached the height of his art. Standing before the massive chair from which he seems to have risen, the tall, gaunt, ungainly figure embodies in its attitude and in every hanging fold of the unfitted garments, the spirit of infinite tenderness, melancholy, and strength that characterized the great emancipator. Although the memory of Lincoln will endure as long as men live upon the earth, the Lincoln of Saint-Gaudens will ever recall to coming generations the plaintive sadness of this greatest of Americans.

In the year 1887 General William Tecumseh Shermangave Saint-Gaudens eighteen sittings for a bust. Sherman had served with distinction in the Mexican War in 1846, and in May, 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War, was appointed colonel of the Thirteenth U.S. Infantry. Rapidly promoted, he took part in many famous campaigns, and in 1864 became commander of the military division of the Mississippi. Assembling in 1864 his three armies, comprising over one hundred thousand men, near Chattanooga, he began an invasion of the State of Georgia, and finally, with 60,000 picked men, made his celebrated “March to the Sea,” from Atlanta to Savannah. The statue of Sherman was begun in 1890, but it was not until 1903 that it was finally erected at the entrance of Central Park in New York City. Led by a symbolic figure of Victory, the general rides forward on his charger. A speaking likeness of Sherman, the statue at the same time seems infused with the spirit of the great struggle, a spirit of invincible determination. It is a monument which may be included among the great equestrian statues of the modern world. “His horse is obviously advancing, and Sherman’s body, tense with nervous energy, is at one with the body beneath him, equally impressive of movement. The winged victory in every fibre quivers with the rhythm of oncoming resistless force.”

In the Rock Creek Cemetery near the City of Washington is a figure which is not only one of the greatest productions of Saint-Gaudens, but unquestionably his most imaginative composition. This is the memorial erected by Mr. Henry Adams to hiswife. The figure is seated and concealed by a loose garment which half veils the face. Saint-Gaudens once spoke of the figure as symbolic of “The Mystery of the Hereafter; it is beyond pain, and beyond joy.” Of this monument Henry Adams wrote to Saint-Gaudens: “The work is indescribably noble and imposing ... it is full of poetry and suggestion, infinite wisdom, a past without beginning and a future without end, a repose after limitless experience, a peace to which nothing matters—all are embodied in this austere and beautiful face and form.”

The world now began to pour its offerings upon Saint-Gaudens. From Harvard University came the honorary degree of LL.D. and the tribute of Dr. Eliot, its president, who said in conferring it: “Augustus Saint-Gaudens—sculptor whose art follows but ennobles nature, confers fame and lasting remembrance, and does not count the mortal years it takes to mould immortal forms.” Degrees from the Universities of Yale and Princeton followed his Harvard honor; at Paris in 1900 he was awarded the medal of honor, “and at Buffalo in the following year a special medal was bestowed upon him, an enthusiastic tribute from his fellow artists, who sought lovingly to exalt him above themselves as the one man they regarded as the master of them all.”

Together with these recognitions came others of equal significance. In the late nineties he was made by the French Government an Officer of the Legion of Honor and a Corresponding Member of the Société des Beaux-Arts, and later from the same source camean offer to purchase certain of his bronzes for the Luxembourg Museum in Paris. In 1904 he was elected Honorary Foreign Academician of the Royal Academy of London, and among his other later distinctions may be included his memberships in the National Academy of New York and the Academy of St. Luke, Rome.

Constantly he answered the call of Europe and found delight and profit in his travels; but the United States grew more dear to him with each passing year. “I belong in America,” he wrote; “that is my home, that is where I want to be and to remain.” But now the tireless energy of his early life began to show its mark on the vigorous vitality which had so long supported him. With his work, and congenial assistants and friends, he began to identify himself more closely with the simple life of his Cornish home. On the third of August, 1907, came the final episode in his memorable career. A long illness attended by much suffering had failed to separate him from his work; carried to his studio to superintend the work of his assistants, he labored until the end. But his life was over, and as he had lived in a realm of spiritual beauty, so in the quiet peace of the New Hampshire hills his spirit passed.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, although of foreign birth and for many years, during the early period of his life, a resident abroad, “remained as distinctly American in his art as if he had come from a long line of native ancestors. He showed his Americanism in striking out in a totally new vein and making his own traditions.”

Of his art much has been written, but a few quotations may suffice. “The special note of the medallions which are conspicuous among his first productions is one of delicacy, and in the character of that delicacy lies a source of strength which was from first to last of immense service.” His touch was “at once caressing and bold,” and he delighted “in giving a clear, even forcible, impression of the personality before him. It is portraiture for the sake of truth and beauty, not for the sake of technique.” In his work in the round, the Adams memorial stands as his “one memorable effort in the sphere of loftiest abstraction. His other greatest triumphs were won in the field of portraiture.” In his studies of historical subjects, Saint-Gaudens “struck the one definitive note, made his Lincoln or Sherman a type which generations must revere and which no future statues can invalidate.”

“People think a sculptor has an easy life in a studio,” he once said. “It’s hard labor in a factory.” And often he remarked, “You can do anything you please. It’s the way it’s done that makes the difference.”

Such was Augustus Saint-Gaudens. To him America afforded an opportunity; richly and many times over did he repay his debt to his adopted land.

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