Augustus Saint-Gaudens: The Shaw Memorial, Pt. 2

Details of the Plaster for the Shaw Memorial
by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Homer Saint-Gaudens wrote: "I should dwell now upon the more serious aspects of the Shaw memorial as it emerged from one of my father's favorite low-reliefs to that extremely 'high' development, which he felt sure would be more effective in the open air. During the process he struggled with difficulty after difficulty, both technical and artistic. In one direction, for example, the constant wetting of the clay and the covering of the Shaw with damp rags became such a nuisance that  he began to look about for a substitute. The result was American plastoline [plasticine] now in common use. A great to-do also arose over such endless questions as those concerning the historical accuracy of the dress. For instance, when it came to the flag, he sent to have the original carefully sketched in the Boston State House.

Another thing were the countless legs and feet of the infantry which seemed to bewilder him, until slowly from the chaos he learned his lesson of dealing with repeated accents; a lesson suggested to him by the effect of the troops passing beneath his window in the days of his cameo cutting, by a French military funeral which he often spoke of as impressing him a few years later, and by the use of the spears and vertical lines in such compositions as Velasquez's 'Surrender of Breda.' 

For another thing, the problem of accoutrements, of the spotty effects made by the canteens, developed in him a sensitive regard for the rounding-off of mechanically hard lines, until the final and uninteresting became always slightly hidden and suggestive. The process took definite shape on a day when he complained to Frederick MacMonnies, then pressing out these canteens, that he hated them, as he did all things completely analyzed and shown. Whereupon MacMonnies replied, 'Hide part of them under the drapery.' At which my father tested his suggestion with such relish at the resulting mystery and charm, that he not only adopted it permanently, but instituted a system of what he later called 'fluing,' a general term including many devices, from the breaking up of lines to the filling of those black holes, which, if he placed logically in his desired folds of drapery, he would model to unsightly depths. 

But, most of all, the flying figure drove my father nearly frantic in his efforts to combine the ideal with the real. For the face he tried first the beautiful head of Miss Annie Page. But that, like the features of any model always became much too personal. So he relied wholly upon his imagination to produce a result which his friends and pupils have said somewhat recalled his mother and somewhat an old model in Paris; though I believe that every woman of beauty who was near him impressed his work. He even returned to the work in later years, having by that time come to the conclusion that the flying figure was not mysterious enough. Therefore he remodeled her once more during the last part of his life.

And what were his thoughts at spending so much thought and time on this monument? In a letter he said:

'Too much time cannot be spent on a task that is to endure for centuries, and it is a great mistake to hurry or hamper any artist in the production of work they have so much at heart. Time passed on it is certainly not money gained, and results from a conscientious endeavor to avoid the execution of an unworthy thing. You should consider yourself fortunate not to have fallen into the hands of a sculptor who would rush the commission through on time, regardless of the future, in order to get and make quickly the most money possible. A bad statue is an impertinence and an offense. Paul Dubois, the great Frenchman, spent fifteen years on his 'Joan of Arc.' I had the Shaw monument fourteen years, the 'Sherman' ten.'"

To be continued

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