Augustus Saint-Gaudens 1848-1907
By Isabella Bragoli
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Hiawatha, 1871-72, carved 1874, The Met
Augustus Saint-Gaudens is generally acknowledged to be the foremost American sculptor of the late 19th century whose works combined naturalism and monumentality. Saint-Gaudens is recognised for redirecting and revitalising the course of American sculpture away from the Neoclassical aesthetic towards a lively, naturalistic style. Saint-Gaudens also ardently promoted the nationalistic concept of an American school of sculpture which subsequently flourished in the United States.
Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin, Ireland to a French father and an Irish mother. When he was six months old, his family immigrated to New York. In 1861, at age thirteen, Saint-Gaudens was apprenticed to Louis Avet, a French stone cameo cutter working in New York, and over the next three years gained a proficient command of the medium that would support him throughout adolescence. Through this craft, Saint-Gaudens earned his living while studying at night at Cooper Union (1861–65) and the National Academy of Design (1865–66) in New York.
In 1867, Saint-Gaudens travelled to Paris where he was admitted to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts. In 1870, following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Saint-Gaudens moved to Rome, where expatriate American Neoclassical sculptors including William Wetmore Story and Harriet Goodhue Hosmer were located. Setting up a studio in the gardens of Palazzo Barberini, Saint-Gaudens began his first full-length sculpture, Hiawatha, a Native American figure inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855). Seated on a rock in a contemplative pose, with his quiver of arrows and bow nearby, the fictional Ojibwe chief is "pondering, musing in the forest /On the welfare of his people." Saint-Gaudens was one of many artists who drew thematic inspiration from "The Song of Hiawatha," reinforcing the stereotype of the "vanishing" Native American. This early marble also exhibits the temporary Neoclassical influence that Saint-Gaudens encountered and engaged with in Rome. He derived greater long-term artistic impetus, however, from the example of fifteenth-century Italian masters, including Ghiberti, Verrocchio, and Donatello.
After returning to New York in 1875, Saint-Gaudens surrounded himself with a circle of artists forming the nucleus of an American artistic renaissance. Two years later, Saint-Gaudens returned to Paris, taking with him the noteworthy commission of the Admiral David Farragut Monument. With this work, Saint-Gaudens redirected his aesthetic away from the waning Neoclassical style to the Beaux-Arts aesthetic, enlivening his sculpture with naturalism and surface bravado that he absorbed from his previous training.
In 1900, Saint-Gaudens settled in Cornish, New Hampshire, the site of a thriving artists’ colony. His international reputation was well established and his position as the foremost American sculptor of his era undisputed. In 1905, he earned a commission from President Theodore Roosevelt to redesign the ten and twenty-dollar gold pieces; the latter is arguably the most inspirational example in the history of American numismatics.
Bibliography
Kaplan, Sidney. "The Sculptural World of Augustus Saint-Gaudens." The Massachusetts Review 30, no. 1 (1989): 17-64. Accessed March 1, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25079070.
Saint-Gaudens, Homer. "Essentials in Memorial Art." The American Magazine of Art 10, no. 7 (1919): 258-60. Accessed March 1, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23925268.
Tolles, Thayer. "Abraham Lincoln: The Man (Standing Lincoln): A Bronze Statuette by Augustus Saint-Gaudens." Metropolitan Museum Journal 48, no. 1 (2013): 223-37. Accessed March 1, 2021. doi:10.1086/675325.