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.)