Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Encore Paris

"William Tecumseh Sherman Monument"
by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Homer Saint-Gaudens wrote: The previous chapter ended the account of my father's life in New York. He never returned there again as a resident. From the 'Farragut' to the 'Shaw' he had given it his prime, his health. He left it a sick man, crippled for the remainder of his life by the ardor of his work. He had but ten years to live, ten years which he contrived through an extraordinary strength of will and body to spend wholly upon his art. 

It was his knowledge that his art had reached its strength that had given him his desire to visit France. For in Paris alone he could measure himself with his contemporaries, place his work before the world's most critical audience, and learn, once for all, wherein it was good and wherein bad.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens recalls: 

'On arriving in Paris, after the usual inevitable agony of a search for a studio, racing from one side of the city to the other, and back and forth, I found a place in a charming little gardenlike passage in the Rue de Bagneux. There I began by remodeling the figure of the Sherman Victory and some studies of the groups I have still to do for the Boston Public Library. I shall do everything that lies in my power to make them as good as anything I have ever executed, and they are somewhat in a category with the Shaw monument. The bust of Martin Brimmer I also did in Paris for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the medallion of Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, who was then visiting Paris. First of all, however, stood my work upon the 'Sherman,' and while I was at it the days came and went rapidly because of my steady and enthusiastic toil.'

Homer continues: '

Another commission was the large variation of his Stevenson relief. It was remodeled for the church of St. Giles in Edinburgh, Scotland. The commission gave him occasion to make two trips to England, where he felt most happy over the cordiality with which he was received by the English artists and sculptors, who ultimately made him a member of the Royal Academy. For example, a dinner was given him at Earl's Court, a sort of London Coney Island, whereat that serious body of men, Sargent, Abbey, Sir Alma-Tadema and the rest, with their serious group of women-folk, behaved as all serious people should upon such an occasion. From that dinner, not so very serious, they went to see the Javanese dancers."

To be continued

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