With the early end of his school days Augustus turned to the actual earning of his daily bread. He was thirteen years old. To his father’s question as to what kind of work appealed most strongly to him he had answered, “I should like it if I could do something which would help me to be an artist.” It was a decision that must have seemed strange to the father, who perhaps had seen in the boy a possible assistant in his growing business; but wisely he respected the desire that Augustus expressed, and a few weeks later the boy was apprenticed to a Frenchman named Avet, the first stone-cameo cutter in America.
A cameo is a fine relief of a human head, or the head of an animal, cut in a stone or shell, often so done as to show the design in a layer of one color with another color as a background. The stones, which were usually amethysts or malachite, were at that period extremely fashionable, and were worn in rings, or scarf-pins, or breast-pins by men and women. The work was fine and required skill and patience and artistic ability; so for a long time Augustus was limited to the preparation of the stones, which Avet would finish and later sell to the leading jewelers of the city.
Avet was a hard taskmaster and the monotonous labor over the whirring lathe was irksome to the red-blooded boy, who looked up from the spinning-wheel at the white clouds sailing across the little window above him and heard the rumble of wheels and the hum of life in the distant street. But in his few hours of leisure there were glimpses of stirring events never to be forgotten. There was the excitement attending the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency, “Honest Abe, the Rail-Splitter.” There was the recruiting of troops for the great Civil War which for four long years racked the land. And later, from the window in front of his lathe, Saint-Gaudens watched the volunteers from New England as they tramped down Broadway, singing “John Brown’s Body” as they marched.
Day after day Saint-Gaudens ground and turned the stones on his lathe, and all day long he listened to the voice of Avet, scolding and swearing as he worked. One day came the breaking-point. At noon the boy had quietly eaten his luncheon from the little box which he brought each morning with him to his work. Some crumbs had fallen on the floor, and Avet, seeing them, burst into a fury and discharged him on the spot. Without comment he folded up his overalls, left the shop, and going at once to his father’s store, explained exactly what had occurred. Within a few minutes Avet followed, apologetic and promising even more money if the boy would return. Without hesitation Saint-Gaudens refused, and in later life he often recalled his father’s “proud smile” as he made his decision.
There is credit in sticking to a hard job, and there is equal credit in a manly refusal to continue to work under intolerable conditions. Saint-Gaudens’s act brought its own reward, for his next employer, Mr. Jules le Brethon, a shell-cameo cutter, was a man unlike Avet in every particular, and it was through this new connection that the path to Saint-Gaudens’s career as a sculptor was opened to him.
With his characteristic foresight in availing himself of every opportunity, the boy had early begun to devote his evenings to the study of drawing in the free classes at the Cooper Institute. Every day at six he left his work, and after a hurried supper, hastened to his classroom. He was appreciative of the great opportunity which the school afforded him, and he threw himself with all his soul into his work. “I became a terrific worker, toiling every night until eleven o’clock after the class was over. 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, and tumbled me downstairs out into the street, where I awoke.”
When the courses at the Cooper Union were finally accomplished, Saint-Gaudens took up new night work at the National Academy of Design, and it was here that his first appreciation of the antique came to him, and his first practice in drawing from the nude—training so fundamental for his great work in coming years.
Early in the year 1867 came another turning-point in his life. Ever since he had first begun to work, Saint-Gaudens had been giving his wages to his father to pay his share of the family expenses. And now the father, realising that the boy’s earnestness and ability were deserving of every opportunity which he could afford, made the offer of a trip to Europe, where he might see the art of the older civilizations and return to the United States broadened by his experience and observations.
Saint-Gaudens was nineteen years old. His father had paid for his passage in the steerage, and in his pocket were a hundred dollars which had been saved out of his wages. Arriving in Paris in a “mixed state of enthusiasm and collapse,” he spent a few days visiting in the household of an uncle, and then began his search of employment at cameo-cutting and of admission to the School of Fine Arts. Work was soon found in the establishment of an Italian. But entrance to the school was a more difficult proposition, and in order that no time should be wasted while he was waiting, he enrolled in a modeling school, working there mornings and nights and supporting himself on what he earned at cameo-cutting in the afternoon.
These were days and nights of almost superhuman exertion, but at the end of a year the desired admission to the school was obtained, and his real education began. It is customary for a student at the Beaux-Arts to select the master in whose atelier he wishes to study, and Saint-Gaudens selected Jouffroy, whose pupils in the preceding years had been particularly successful in capturing most of the prizes which were offered by the school.