Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Dublin, March 1, 1848 - Cornish, New Hampshire, August 3, 1907), was the Irish born American sculptor of the Beaux Arts generation who most embodied the ideals of the "American Renaissance."

Raised in New York, after immigrating to America at six months of age, he was apprenticed to a cameo-cutter, but also took art classes at the Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. At 19, his apprenticeship completed, he traveled to Paris where he studied in the atelier of Francois Jouffroy at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1870, he left Paris for Rome, to study art and architecture, and worked on his first commissions. There he met an American art student, Augusta Homer, whom he married in 1877. In 1876 he received his first major commission; a monument to Civil War Admiral David Farragut, in New York's Madison Square; his friend Stanford White designed an architectural setting for it, and when it was unveiled in 1881, its naturalism, its lack of bombast, its siting combined to make it a tremendous success, and Saint-Gaudens' reputation was established. The commissions followed fast: the colossal Standing Lincoln in Lincoln Park, Chicago in a setting by White 1884 - 87; a long series of funerary monuments and busts: Adams Memorial, the Peter Cooper Monument, and the John A. Logan Monument, the greatest of which is the bronze bas-relief that forms the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common, 1884 - 1897, commemorating in the heart of Abolitionism, the 54th Regiment, the first African-American regiment raised in the North; Saint-Gaudens labored on it fourteen years, and even after the public version had been unveiled, he continued with further versions. Two grand equestrian monuments to Civil War generals are outstanding: to General John A. Logan, atop a tumulus in Chicago, 1894-97, and to General William Tecumseh Sherman at the corner of Central Park in New York, 1892-1903, the first use of Robert Treat Paine’s pointing device for the accurate mechanical enlargement of sculpture models.

His prominence brought him students, and he was an able and sensitive teacher. He tutored young artists privately, taught at the Art Students League, and took on a large number of assistants. He was an artistic advisor to the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, an avid supporter of the American Academy in Rome, and part of the MacMillan Commission, which brought into being L'Enfant's long-ignored master-plan for the nation's capital.

Through his career Augustus Saint-Gaudens' made a specialty of intimate private portrait panels in sensitive, very low relief, which owed something to the Florentine Renaissance. He referred to his early relief portraits as "medallions" and took a great interest in the art of the coin: his twenty-dollar gold piece, the "double eagle" coins he designed for the US Mint, 1905-7, though it was adapted for minting, is still considered the most beautiful American coin ever issued.

Diagnosed with cancer in 1900, he decided to live at his Federal house with barn-studio set in the handsome gardens he had made, where he and his family had been spending summers since 1885, in Cornish, New Hampshire— though not in retirement; despite diminishing energy, he continued to work, producing a steady stream of reliefs and public sculpture. In 1904, he was one of the first seven chosen for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That same year the large studio burned, with the irreplaceable loss of the sculptor's correspondence, his sketch books, and many works in progress.

At Cornish, New Hampshire, Saint-Gaudens and his brother Louis attracted a summer colony of artists. The most famous included painters Maxfield Parrish, and Kenyon Cox, architect and garden designer Charles Platt, and sculptor Paul Manship. The colony of artists made for a dynamic social and creative environment, at the center of which stood Augustus Saint-Gaudens.Many other well known artists followed Saint-Gaudens to Cornish, forming what became known as the "Cornish Colony." Included were painters Maxfield Parrish, Thomas Dewing, George Deforest Brush and Kenyon Cox, dramatist Percy MacKaye, the American novelist Winston Churchill, architect, Charles Platt, and sculptors Paul Manship and Louis Saint-Gaudens, Augustus' brother. The colony of artists made for a dynamic social and creative environment, at the center of which stood Augustus Saint-Gaudens; after his death in 1907 it slowly disspiated. His house and gardens is a National Historic Site.

His life-size sculpture representing the Boston Massacre was unfinished at his death, but as of 1995 is undergoing restoration at the National Historic Site.

References

• Armstrong, Craven, et al, 200 Years of American Sculpture, Whitney Museum of Art, NYC, 1976

• Craven, Wayne, Sculpture in America, Thomas Y. Crowell Co, NY, NY 1968

• Dryfhout, John H., Augustus Saint-Gaudens: The Portrait Reliefs, The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Grossman Publishers, NY 1969

• Dryfhout, John H., The 1907 United States Gold Coinage, Eastern National Park & Monument Association 1996

• Dryfhout, John H., The Works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, University Press of New England, Hanover 1982

• Greenthal, Kathryn, Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Master Sculptor, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Your 1985

• Kvaran, Einar Einarsson, St. Gaudens’ America, unpublished Manuscript

• Reynalds, Donald Martin, Masters of American Sculpture: The Figurative Tradition From the American Renaissance to the Millennium, Abbeville Press, NY 1993

• Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Edited and Amplified by Homer Saint-Gaudens, Published By The Century Co. New York, MCMXIII

• Taft, Lorado, The History of American Sculpture, MacMillan Co., New York, NY 1925

• Wilkinson, Burke, and David Finn, photographs, Uncommon Clay: The Life and Works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, San Diego 1985

External links

• Major public works, illustrated (http://www.sgnhs.org/public2.html)