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 the preparation 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. Without
hesitation 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 here that 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 education began. 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 places were
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 whose friendship 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 had developed 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,—which stands 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
memorable occasion: “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-Gaudens moved 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 is a
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 Sherman gave 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 his wife. 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 came an 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.”