Augustus Saint-Gaudens (; March 1, 1848 – August 3, 1907) was an American sculptor of the Beaux-Arts generation who embodied the ideals of the American Renaissance.
Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin to an Irish-French family, and raised in New York City. He traveled to Europe for further training and artistic study. After he returned to New York City, he achieved major critical success for his monuments commemorating heroes of the American Civil War, many of which still stand. Saint-Gaudens created works such as the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common, Abraham Lincoln: The Man, and grand equestrian monuments to Civil War generals: General John Logan Memorial in Chicago's Grant Park and William Tecumseh Sherman at the corner of New York's Central Park. In addition, he created the popular historicist representation of The Puritan.
Saint-Gaudens also created Classical works such as the Diana, and employed his design skills in numismatics. He designed the $20 Saint Gaudens Double Eagle gold coin (1905–1907) for the US Mint, considered one of the most beautiful American coins ever issued, and the $10 "Indian Head" gold eagle; both of these were minted from 1907 until 1933. In his later years he founded the "Cornish Colony", an artist's colony in New Hampshire that included notable painters, sculptors, writers, and architects. His brother Louis Saint-Gaudens, with whom he occasionally collaborated, was also a well-known sculptor.
Saint-Gaudens was born on Charlemont Street in Dublin, Ireland, to an Irish mother (Mary McGuinness from County Longford) and French father, Bernard Paul Ernest Saint-Gaudens, a shoemaker by trade from a village in the French Pyrenees, Aspet, 15 kilometers from Saint-Gaudens. His parents emigrated to America when he was six months of age, and he was reared in New York City.
In 1861, he became an apprentice to a cameo-cutter, Louis Avet, and took evening art classes at the Cooper Union in New York City. Two years later, he was hired as an apprentice of Jules Le Brethon, another cameo cutter, and enrolled at the National Academy of Design. His apprenticeship was completed by the age of 19 and he traveled to Paris in 1867, where he studied in the atelier of François Jouffroy at the École des Beaux-Arts.
In 1870, he left Paris for Rome to study art and architecture, and worked on his first commissions. There he met a deaf American art student, Augusta Fisher Homer. They married on June 1, 1877. The couple had one child, a son named Homer Saint-Gaudens.
In 1874, Edwards Pierrepont, a prominent New York reformer, hired Saint-Gaudens to create a marble bust of himself. Pierrepont, a phrenologist, proved to be a demanding client, insisting that Saint-Gaudens make his head larger. Saint-Gaudens said that Pierrepont's bust "seemed to be affected with some dreadful swelling disease" and he later told a friend that he would "give anything to get hold of that bust and smash it to atoms".
In 1876, he won a commission for a bronze David Farragut Memorial. He rented a studio at 49 rue Notre Dame des Champs. Stanford White designed the pedestal. It was unveiled on May 25, 1881, in Madison Square Park. He collaborated with Stanford White again in 1892–1894 when he created Diana as a weather vane for the second Madison Square Garden building in New York City; a second version used is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with several reduced versions in museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The statue stood on a 300-foot-high tower, making Diana the highest point in the city. It was also the first statue in that part of Manhattan to be lit at night by electricity. The statue and its tower was a landmark until 1925 when the building was demolished.
His masterpiece, Amor Caritas (Angel of Charity), is his vision of the ethereal female, which he modeled repeatedly in stone and bronze between 1880 and 1898. A heroic-sized bronze version won the Grand Prize at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, cementing Saint-Gaudens' reputation as America's premier sculptor. Because of its popularity, some 20 smaller-scale versions were produced by Saint-Gaudens and sold through high-end retail outlets such as Tiffany & Co. Most of them are now in museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The face of the angel, like that of Diana, is modeled after the artist's longtime mistress and muse, Davida Johnson Clark.
In New York, he was a member of the Tile Club, a group of prominent artists and writers, including Winslow Homer (his wife's fourth cousin), William Merritt Chase and Arthur Quartley. He was also a member of The Lambs, Salmagundi Club and the National Arts Club in New York City.
Civil War commemorative commissions
In 1876, Saint-Gaudens 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 and its siting combined to make it a tremendous success, and Saint-Gaudens' reputation was established.
The commissions followed fast, including the colossal Abraham Lincoln: The Man in Lincoln Park, Chicago in a setting by architect White, 1884–1887, considered the finest portrait statue in the United States (a replica was placed at Lincoln's tomb in Springfield, Illinois, and another stands in Parliament Square, London). The statue was highly influential for American artists and received widespread praise by critics.
Other commissions included numerous memorials, funerary monuments and busts, including the Adams Memorial, the Peter Cooper Monument at Cooper Square, and the John A. Logan Monument. Arguably the greatest of these monuments is the bronze bas-relief that forms the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common, 1884–1897, which Saint-Gaudens labored on for 14 years; 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, 1894–1897, and to William Tecumseh Sherman on Grand Army Plaza at the corner of Central Park in New York (with the African-American model Hettie Anderson posing as an allegorical Victory), 1892–1903, the first use of Robert Treat Paine's pointing device for the accurate mechanical enlargement of sculpture models. The depictions of the African-American soldiers on the Shaw memorial is noted as a rare example of true-to-life, non-derogatory, depictions of African physical characteristics in 19th-century American art.
For the Lincoln Centennial of 1909, Saint-Gaudens produced another statue of the president. A seated figure, Abraham Lincoln: The Head of State, is in Chicago's Grant Park. Saint-Gaudens completed the design work and had begun casting the statue at the time of his death—his workshop completed it. The statue's head was used as the model for the commemorative postage stamp issued on the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's birth.
Saint-Gaudens also created the statue for the monument of Charles Stewart Parnell, which was installed at the north end of Dublin's O'Connell Street, backing on to Parnell Square in 1911.
In 1887, when Robert Louis Stevenson made his second trip to the United States, Saint-Gaudens had the opportunity to make the preliminary sketches for a five-year project of a medallion depicting Stevenson, in very poor health at the time, propped in bed writing. With minor modifications, this medallion was reproduced for the Stevenson memorial in St. Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh. Stevenson's cousin and biographer, Graham Balfour, deemed the work "the most satisfactory of all the portraits of Stevenson". Balfour also noted that Saint-Gaudens greatly admired Stevenson and had once said he would "gladly go a thousand miles for the sake of a sitting" with him.
Saint-Gaudens was also commissioned by a variety of groups to create medals including varied commemorative themes like The Women"s Auxiliary of the Massachusetts Civil Service Reform Association Presentation Medal and the World's Columbian Exposition Medal. Such pieces stand testament to both his broad appeal and the respect that was given to him by his contemporaries.