Augustus Saint-Gaudens: La Petite École

"Augustus Saint-Gaudens" by Kenyon Cox

"My time at the little 'École de Médicine,' as they called the school, was enlivened by many amusing incidents, the result of the radical difference in the characters of the two professors who taught, one on Wednesdays and the other on Saturdays. 

Georges Jacquot, a short, loud-spoken, good-natured professor - and sculptor - came on Wednesday. He was entirely democratic, saying the most amusing things to the pupils. Although merry and good-hearted, he was a terror, from the fact that he indicated our errors with a very thick charcoal; so to those of us who had learned to work rather delicately and firmly his marks were only bearable because of the jollity with which he made them. While he taught, the boys raised as much noise as the uniformed and ill-natured 'gardien' at the doorway would permit.

On Saturdays Alexandre Laemlein criticized, a man of a totally different type. When he appeared, the class remained silent. He was austere, taking the greatest care to apply his suggestions with light touches, always certain and correct. Jacquot talked with a strange kind of mixed-up lisp as if he had a marble in his mouth, whereas Laemlein spoke with a deliberate nasal tone. Jacquot maintained that you must draw freely and with no fear of the paper, while Laemlein's advice was to the effect that you should draw lightly, carefully, and firmly, and not with sloppiness as do those who pretend to work with vigor. The result of this weekly divergence of views upon the boys can be imagined. In these surroundings, then, I prospered until at last I was awarded the first prize, and, subsequently, with a lot of other successful youths, received, with the medal, a crown of laurel. 

At this time also, at the end of these nine months of the Petite École, I felt much impressed by the receipt of a large envelope with the United States seal on it, notifying me of my admission to the Beaux Arts. This was a great joy. My first step was to obtain the authorization from the Master whose atelier I wished to enter, and selected sculptor François Jouffroy because at that time Jouffroy's atelier was the triumphant one of the Beaux Arts, his class capturing, as a rule, most of the prizes."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his son Homer Saint-Gaudens.)  

 

Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Arrival in Paris

"Gertrude Vanderbilt at the Age of Seven"
by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

"My arrival in Paris in February 1867 was extraordinarily impressive. I walked with my heavy carpet bag, the weight of which increased, as I made my way up the interminable Avenue des Champs Elysees to my uncle François'. A day or two after my arrival I went about in search of employment at cameo cutting and of admission to the School of Fine Arts. The cameo cutting I obtained at once from an Italian, Lupi, supporting myself on what I earned by the cameos  and attending a modeling school in the mornings and nights.

However I found my entrance into the Beaux Arts a formidable business. After much running around, I saw at last M. Guillaume, the Director of the School, who, to my thinking, received me with unusual affability for so wonderful a man. I recall his smile as I told him that I expected to learn sculpture during the nine months I proposed to remain in Paris, the limit to which I had expected my money would extend. From him I gathered that I could enter only through the formal application of the American Minister. I thereupon called on Mr. Washburne, then occupying that post. He also seemed kind, smiled as I related my little story, and said that I would be informed when the application had been accepted. This notification I received exactly nine months after handing it in.

In the meantime, fortunately, I not only earned a good living by cutting cameos, but also entered a smaller school, though an excellent one, and began my Parisian studies, probably in March or April, 1868. We worked in a stuffy, overcrowded, absolutely unventilated theater, with two rows of students, perhaps twenty-five in each row, seated in a semicircle before the model who stood against the wall. Behind those who drew were about fifteen sculptors, and I look back with admiration upon the powers of youth to live, work, and be joyful in an atmosphere that must have been almost asphyxiating. Here I modeled my first figures from the nude, and laid an excellent foundation for the future." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his son Homer Saint-Gaudens.)  

 

Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Turning Points

"Jules Bastien Lepage" by
Augustus Saint-Gaudens

"My firing by Avet opened the second by-road in my career which led to my being a sculptor. At this time there lived in New York a man entirely the reverse of my first employer, Mr. Jules LeBrethon, a shell-cameo cutter, who earned his living by making the large shell-cameo portraits in vogue during this period of big hoop skirts. I had learned very easily with Avet the cutting of shell-cameos, this being a far simpler affair. To my delight, I discovered that he had a stone-cameo lathe, which he could not use. I began work at once, and the three years of so with him were as day is to night in comparison with my previous experience. The only thing that he had in common with Avet was that he also sang from morning to night. He, however, never scolded or showed anything but consideration in my affairs. Indeed, because of this interest, he even allowed me an extra hour every day, beside my dinner period, in which to model, and gave me instruction at that time.

My first trip to Europe, which was another turning point in my life, came about when, at the beginning of the year 1867, Father asked me if I would like to see the coming Paris Exposition. To my enthusiastic assent he said, 'We will arrange that,' since I had, of course, been giving my wages, which were ample for a boy of that age at that time, help the running of the family.

Between that date and the moment upon which my steamer sailed, three incidents alone hold their place in my memory. The first of them concerns one of the large and hilarious dinners interspersed through out lives, which on this occasion, father planned in honor of my departure. The second deals with another banquet furnished by good-hearted LeBrethon the night before I left, at which, as I picked up my napkin, I found under the plate one hundred francs in gold, 'To pay for a trip to father's village in France.' But most of all I recall how, during those last nights and Sunday, I made a bust of father and a drawing of mother. The latter, being perhaps the possession I treasured most in the world, was destroyed in the fire that a year ago burnt down my studio."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his son Homer Saint-Gaudens.)  

 

Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Apprenticed

Cameo of "Hannah Rohr Tuffs"
by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

"Up to this time, after school, my free hours had been occupied in carrying the shoes, first to father's workmen to have them made, and later to the customers by whom they were ordered. Then, when I was just thirteen, my father said to me one day: 'My boy, you must go to work. What would you like to do?' 'I don't care,' I replied, 'but I should like it if I could do something which would help me to be an artist.'

Consequently father apprenticed me to a man named Avet, a Savoyard, dark, with a mustache which extended down along the side of the cheek and jaw. When he was not scolding me, he sang continuously. I believe that I am not wrong in stating that he was the first stone cameo-cutter in America, though stone seal-engravers there were already in New York, as well as shell cameo-engravers. For it was the fashion at that time for men to wear stone scarf-pins with heads of dogs, horses and lions, cut in amethyst, malachite and other stones.

I was Avet's first apprentice, and the stones which I prepared for him he would finish, occasionally allowing me to complete one myself. He was employed principally by Messrs. Ball, Black & Company, who had their store on the corner of Spring Street and Broadway, and now and then by Tiffany, to both of which shops I took the cameos when completed, always with a profound impression of the extraordinary splendor of those places.

Avet was certainly an old-time, hard taskmaster, so I can only describe my years with him as composing a miserable slavery. To this training, nevertheless, I attribute a habit of work which, although it has been of the greatest benefit, has at the same time contributed to my struggle for health as well as limited my vision to what was immediately in my surroundings, and made me oblivious to what lay beyond the four walls of my studio. 

Between Avet's fits of rage, he would take me to the country on shooting excursions. During these trips my keen appreciation of the beauty and wonders of the landscape was so intense that no subsequent experience has ever come up to it. The memory of the first lying on the grass under the trees and the first looking through the branches at the flying clouds, will stay by me if I live to be as old as ten Methuselahs." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his son Homer Saint-Gaudens.)  

Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Fired

Augustus Saint-Gaudens 
at his cameo lathe

"It was during the opening two or three years of my apprenticeship to Avet that my earliest definite aspirations and ambitions had made themselves felt. For I applied for admission to the drawing school of the Cooper Institute. There every evening, upon my return from work at six o'clock and my hasty tea I went. And there my artistic education began. The feeling of profound gratitude for the help which I have had from that school abides with me to this day. 

With such an incentive I became a terrific worker, toiling every night until eleven o'clock after the class was over, in the conviction that in me another heaven-born genius had been given to the world. 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, which consisted of tea and large quantities of long French loaves of bread with butter, and tumbled me down stairs out into the street, where I awoke.

My appreciation of the antique [plaster casts] and my earliest attempt to draw from the nude came at the Institute with the advice of Mr. Huntington and Mr. Leutze, the latter being the painter of the popular 'Washington Crossing the Delaware.' Two other lasting aesthetic impressions of the time I received upon seeing Ward's 'Indian Hunter' in plaster in the back of some picture store on Broadway, and Gérome's painting of 'The Death of Caesar,' exhibited in the window of Goupil's, then on the northeast corner of Tenth Street and Broadway.

I have spoken before of Avet's scoldings. At last one day, on coming into the shop in an exceptionally violent state of anger, he suddenly discharged me because I had forgotten to sweep up the crumbs I had dropped on the floor while lunching. I took off my overalls, wrapped them up, went to father's store, and explained the story to my parents, feeling that the end of the world had arrived. Within half an hour Avet appeared. I was sent on some errand, and on returning was told that he wanted me back at an advance of five dollars a week on my wages. However I replied that I would not return under any condition. This was no doubt the most heroic act of my existence. Nevertheless the incident, as will appear, opened the second by-road in my career which led to my being a sculptor."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his son Homer Saint-Gaudens.)

Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Background

"My father's full name was Bernard Paul Ernest Saint-Gaudens. 'Bernard Paul Honeste, if you please,' he called it later in life. It sounded nicer. He was born in the little village of Aspet, five miles south of the town of Saint-Gaudens, in the arrondissement of Saint-Gaudens, in the department of the Haute-Garonne, a most beautiful country. He learned his trade of shoemaker in the employment of his elder brother who had quite a large establishment of thirty or forty workmen. When through with his apprenticeship, he moved northward from his native village as a journeyman shoemaker, a member of the 'Compagnons du Tour de France,' a popular organization which facilitated the traveling of workmen from town to town, the members being pledged to procure employment for one another as they arrived.  They each had some affectionate sobriquet; my father's was 'Saint-Gaudens la Constance,' of which he was very proud. 

My father passed three years in London, and later, seven years in Dublin, Ireland, where he met my mother in the shoe store for which he made shoes and where she did the binding of slippers. Father told me that an overcrowded passenger list prevented his leaving Dublin with my mother, with me at her breast, in a ship named 'Star of the West' that burned at sea during the trip. 

They landed at Boston town, probably in September, 1848, then found work in New York, where we went to a house on the west side of Forsyth Street, where now is the bronze foundry in which the statue of Peter Cooper that I modeled was cast forty-five years later. And it was there I made the beginnings of my conscious life." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his son Homer Saint-Gaudens.)

Franz Xaver Winterhalter: Faithful 02 03

"Isabella Brandt" by Peter Paul Rubens

"Franz Xaver Winterhalter sought respite from the pressures of a busy portrait practice in holidays abroad, In Italy, Switzerland and above all, in Germany. He remained firmly attached to his native country by past ties and deep family affections. He and his brother Hermann travelled regularly to Karlsruhe, Baden-Baden and the Black Forest. They remained in constant touch with their father, and they continued to support him and their sisters on a generous scale. In the autumn of 1851, for example, Winterhalter sent a remittance of 3,000 francs to his father (5,000 the year before), and 6,000 francs to each sister; to Theresia for the education of her sons; to Justina for a new kitchen at the Adler Inn.

As the Second Empire approached its zenith, Winterhalter's world contracted. The reminiscences of the art critic, Friedrich Pecht, provide an invaluable insight into his life at this time:

'Formerly he had had a small pale head with black hair its chief attraction, now the locks were silver-grey. He had withdrawn from French society and associated almost exclusively with Germans. They formed a small circle round him, which met at his table for the excellent cooking of Mère Morel, to whom he introduced me. I later spent most of my evenings there.

Winterhalter was always high spirited, and when we left the restaurant we went to the Grand Café to enjoy our demi-tasse, after which we would stroll along the boulevards till late at night. He would tell comic stories about his own youth, and his time in Italy, the very last thing he would do would be to boast about his high acquaintances and sitters, as so many others did. His criticisms of works of art were individual, never depreciative.

Though depreciatively nicknamed 'the Frenchman' he remained always a German, for all his love of French manners and Paris. Yes, it was touching to see how he could not suppress his German nature.'

Pecht's impression is confirmed by another contemporary, W. Landgraf:

'I made Winterhalter's personal acquaintance in Paris in 1853. Never did a royal portrait painter correspond less to the conception one has of such a favourite of rulers. He had remained completely simple, natural and without mannerisms, and even retained something of the southern German rural population about him. His lifestyle, his needs were extremely modest. His correspondingly simple studio contained only on ornament, naturally the most exquisite and costly: a wonderful large portrait of a woman (lifesize half-portrait) by P.P. Rubens that probably represents his first wife with a fur wrapper over her shoulders.'" 

To be continued

(Excerpts from the introduction by Richard Ormund, to "Franz Xaver Winterhalter and the Courts of Europe 1830-70.")