American Renaissance Sculptor

New York and Rome

Augustus Saint-Gaudens was an Irish-American sculptor who came into this world on March 1. 1848 in Dublin, Ireland. His mother was Irish and his father was French. His parents immigrated to the US when he was just an infant. They settled in New York City.

Saint-Gaudens became an apprentice to a cameo cutter learning to carve images into jewelry. At this time, he also took art classes at the Cooper Union (a privately funded college in the East Village in New York City at Cooper Square and Astor Place) and the National Academy of Design (an honorary association of American artists).

As do most artists he traveled to Paris, France at the age of 19 and studied in the studio of Francois Jouffroy at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts or School of Fine Arts. Later on in 1870, Saint-Gaudens went to Rome, Italy where he studied art and architecture and was able to work on his first commissions. In Rome, he met the woman whom he would marry Augusta Fisher Homer who was a deaf American art student.

They returned to New York and were married in 1877. Saint-Gaudens was now a member of the Tilers a group of prominent artists and writers. Among them were Winslow Homer (an American landscape painter and printmaker and his wife’s fourth cousin), William Merritt Chase (an American Impressionism painter), and Arthur Quartley (an American painter best known for his marine seascapes).

Standing Lincoln Statue

The sculptor’s first major commission came in 1876 when he was engaged to sculpt a monument to Civil War Admiral David Farragut in Madison Square in New York. Saint-Gaudens friend Stanford White designed the architectural setting for this monument. It was unveiled in 1881 and established Saint-Gaudens' reputation. One commission followed another.

One impressive commission was the Standing Lincoln statue in Lincoln Park in Chicago. The setting for the statue was also done by White. It is considered to be the finest portrait statue in the United States. There are two copies of the Standing Lincoln statue one at Lincoln’s Tomb in Springfield, Illinois and the other in front of Westminster Abbey facing Parliament Square in London, England.

Saint-Gaudens’ artworks include many funerary monuments and busts some of them are the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington D.C., the Peter Cooper Monument at Cooper Union in New York, and the John A. Logan Monument in Grant Park in Chicago.

One of Saint-Gaudens’ most impressive funerary monuments is the bronze bas-relief forming the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common. It took the sculptor fourteen years of work to complete this memorial.

Worth mentioning are two equestrian monuments in honor of two Civil War generals. General John A. Logan (mentioned above)

A monument of General William Tecumseh Sherman stands at the corner of Central Park in New York.

Saint-Gaudens made another statue of Abraham Lincoln in 1909 in honor of the Lincoln Centennial. This statue is of a seated Lincoln – Abraham Lincoln: The Head of State and is located in Grant Park in Chicago. On the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, a commemorative postage stamp was issued with a picture of this statue’s head on it.

Medallions

Among other types of work, Saint-Gaudens also made medallions. One medallion was of Robert Louis Stevenson showing the writer who was in ill health propped up in his bed writing. It was reproduced for the Stevenson Memorial at St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The sculptor also designed a double eagle coin for the U.S. Mint and was chosen by Theodore Roosevelt at the beginning of the 20th century to redesign the coinage of the nation. Saint-Gaudens made an ultra high-relief $20 gold piece.

Cornish Art Colony

At the Art Students League of New York Saint-Gaudens taught art students and privately tutored them. He had many assistants to help him. For the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, he became the artistic advisor. Saint-Gaudens supported both the American Academy in Rome and part of the McMillan Commission.

Saint-Gaudens was diagnosed with cancer in 1900 and he then decided to live in Cornish, New Hampshire at his Federal house which had a barn studio and lovely gardens. Once Saint-Gaudens with his family started spending summers in Cornish, New Hampshire in 1885 the sculptor became part of the Cornish Art Colony. Either full-time or during the summers many artists, writers, sculptors, and designers lived in Cornish.

Even though his energy was fading he continued to work and was one of the first of seven who were chosen for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences accepted him as a member in 1896. During a fire in this studio, the sculptor lost many sketches and other works of art. When Saint-Gaudens died in 1907 his house and gardens were preserved as the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site.

Saint-Gaudens was posthumously elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1920 and he was honored in 1940 by the U.S. Post Office which chose him to appear on a postage stamp when they issued their postage stamp series The Famous American Series honoring America’s famous artists, poets, educators, authors, scientists, composers and inventors.