In 1878 Saint-Gaudens again visited Paris, but this time his work and study held him there for three years. In a quiet studio which he hired in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, work was begun on the Farragut statue, and also on a series of figures which were designed to ornament a mausoleum which Governor Morgan of Connecticut had commissioned him to execute. It is a strange coincidence that the angels for the Morgan tomb were later destroyed by fire, as were the angels of St. Thomas’s Church.
“In the years I passed this time in Paris there was little of the adventurous swing of life that pervaded my previous struggles.” Work on his commissions almost wholly occupied him. There were, however, occasional excursions, and the presence of two friends, Stanford White and McKim, who were already winning their reputation as brilliant New York architects, did much to break the tedium of his work.
The Farragut statue was finally completed, and on the afternoon of a beautiful day in May, 1881, it was unveiled to the eyes of the public. In his “Reminiscences” Saint-Gaudens described this memorable occasion: “These formal unveilings of monuments are impressive affairs and variations from the toughness that pervades a sculptor’s life. For we constantly deal with practical problems, with moulders, contractors, derricks, stone-men, ropes, builders, scaffoldings, marble assistants, bronze-men, trucks, rubbish-men, plasterers, and what-not else, all the while trying to soar into the blue.—But if managed intelligently there is a swing to unveilings, and the moment when the veil drops from the monument certainly makes up for many of the woes that go towards the creating of the work. On this special occasion Mr. Joseph H. Choate delivered the oration. The sailors who assisted added to the picturesqueness of the procession. The artillery placed in the park, back of the statue, was discharged. And when the figure in the shadow stood unveiled, and the smoke rolled up into the sunlight upon the buildings behind it, the sight gave an impression of dignity and beauty that it would take a rare pen to describe.”
During the year 1877 Saint-Gaudens was married to Augusta F. Homer of Boston. Recognition had come to his work; his professional future seemed assured. Now, by this happy marriage, domestic tranquillity and congenial companionship were added.
On his return from Europe Saint-Gaudens took a studio on Thirty-Sixth Street in New York, and here were begun the Sunday afternoon concerts which soon became celebrated because of the literary men and artists who gathered there, and invitations were eagerly sought and highly prized. But in 1885 Saint-Gaudens moved from the city and established his family in an old Colonial house at Cornish, New Hampshire. “I had been a boy of the streets and sidewalks all my life,” he says, “but during this first summer in the country, it dawned on me seriously how much there was outside of my little world.” Here was open country, a land of green hills and sky, a place where the man to whom beauty was a living thing might find widening inspiration.
Of the many monuments which Saint-Gaudens created there are five which commemorate great heroes of the Civil War. The monument of Admiral Farragut has been mentioned; standing in the heart of the country’s greatest city, it carries daily to the thousands who pass an unconscious inspiration—as though treading the swinging deck of his flagship, the Admiral seems to look forward with a grim determination, inflexible, indomitable—a man.
The Shaw memorial was undertaken in 1884. The second of this historic series, Saint-Gaudens expected to complete it within a comparatively short time; but it was not until 1897 that the memorial was unveiled in Boston. Robert Gould Shaw was a young Bostonian who was killed in action while leading his regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts—a regiment of colored men led by white officers. The memorial is in the form of a large bas-relief. Although unfortunately placed, it is one of Saint-Gaudens’s most highly considered works. Across the relief the colored troops march to the drum beat; there is the rhythm of a passing regiment and a martial animation, but over all is a sense of melancholy; in the faces of the soldiers, the tense look of anticipation of the impending battle. Occupying the centre of the panel, Shaw rides beside his men, an expression of sadness on his youthful face. Above the scene floats a figure to which the master gave no name, but which his interpreters and pupils have called Fame and Death.
During the early nineties Saint-Gaudens produced two more statues, both of which have been placed in the city of Chicago. In the equestrian monument to General Logan, Saint-Gaudens gave an indication of the greater statue, that of General Sherman, which was soon to follow. In the Logan monument he found a subject susceptible of broad interpretation. The general, mounted on a spirited charger, rides with the air of a conqueror. There is the “smell of the battlefield” in his face. The body seems a living thing, moving flesh and blood are incased in the wind-blown uniform.
But in his statue of Abraham Lincoln, Saint-Gaudens reached the height of his art. Standing before the massive chair from which he seems to have risen, the tall, gaunt, ungainly figure embodies in its attitude and in every hanging fold of the unfitted garments, the spirit of infinite tenderness, melancholy, and strength that characterized the great emancipator. Although the memory of Lincoln will endure as long as men live upon the earth, the Lincoln of Saint-Gaudens will ever recall to coming generations the plaintive sadness of this greatest of Americans.
In the year 1887 General William Tecumseh Sherman gave Saint-Gaudens eighteen sittings for a bust. Sherman had served with distinction in the Mexican War in 1846, and in May, 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War, was appointed colonel of the Thirteenth U.S. Infantry. Rapidly promoted, he took part in many famous campaigns, and in 1864 became commander of the military division of the Mississippi. Assembling in 1864 his three armies, comprising over one hundred thousand men, near Chattanooga, he began an invasion of the State of Georgia, and finally, with 60,000 picked men, made his celebrated “March to the Sea,” from Atlanta to Savannah. The statue of Sherman was begun in 1890, but it was not until 1903 that it was finally erected at the entrance of Central Park in New York City. Led by a symbolic figure of Victory, the general rides forward on his charger. A speaking likeness of Sherman, the statue at the same time seems infused with the spirit of the great struggle, a spirit of invincible determination. It is a monument which may be included among the great equestrian statues of the modern world. “His horse is obviously advancing, and Sherman’s body, tense with nervous energy, is at one with the body beneath him, equally impressive of movement. The winged victory in every fibre quivers with the rhythm of oncoming resistless force.”