Augustus Saint-Gaudens: The Adams Memorial

"The Adams Memorial" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Homer Saint-Gaudens wrote: "It must not be imagined that during the stay of the Shaw Memorial in my father's studio that it occupied his thoughts to the exclusion of other work. Quite on the contrary, there were periods of months when he would refuse to look at this task, in order that upon seeing it once more he might have a fresh eye and unconsciously matured thoughts. In the course of the first ten years in the Thirty-sixth Street studio nearly forty other works, which varied in importance from large plaques to such smaller portraits as that of Miss Violet Sargent, modeled in exchange for John Sargent's painting of myself, were completed."

Among these concurrent commissions were also Augustus Saint-Gaudens' "Lincoln, the Man," for the city of Chicago, "The Puritan," which was so popular that he made forty reductions of it, and the "Adams Memorial," a grave marker for Marian Hooper Adams located in the Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C. 

The account is once more taken up by Homer: "He looked back with fondness to the time spent upon this latter monument, curtained off in a studio corner. Here was one of the few opportunities offered him to break from the limitations of portraiture, limitations from which all his life he longed to be free, in order to create imaginative compositions. Moreover, he constantly spoke to me and to others of his pleasure in suggesting the half-concealed, and because of this pleasure, the veiled face of this figure gave him infinite delight to dwell upon. 

At the date Mr. Adams gave Saint-Gaudens the commission, he felt in sympathy with the religious attitudes of the East. So my father sought to embody a philosophic calm, a peaceful acceptance of death and whatever lay in the future. He conceived the figure as both sexless and passionless, a figure for which there posed sometimes a man, sometimes a woman. 

A description was the end result was written up in a Parisian magazine:

'A woman is seated upon a block of stone, with her back against the monolith. She is covered from head to foot by an ample cloak which falls about her in simple, dignified folds. Her head alone is visible, a stern and forbidding profile. Her chin is resting upon her hand; her eyes are cast down. She is not sleeping, she is musing; and that reverie will last as long as the stone itself. Silent, dead as the world knows her, wholly absorbed in her reverie, she is the image of Eternity and Meditation... In me personally it awakens a deeper emotion than any other modern work of art.'"

To be continued

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