AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH IN THE COLLECTION OF MRS. ROSE NICHOLS
Saint-Gaudens' artistic education was completed in Europe, where he went at the age of eighteen and stayed almost continuously for nearly fourteen years. His father sent him first to Paris. There his progress in the art schools was marked, although he continued to support himself by his trade, and could give only half his time to sculpture. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War he reluctantly refrained from enlisting in the French army and left for Italy. It was in Rome that he first found sculpture remunerative, and finally was able to drop cameo-cutting. The years from 1866 to 1880, which he spent in Rome and Paris, with only occasional visits to America, were singularly happy ones, characterized by a capacity for continuous work at a high pitch of excellence.
The letters from Saint-Gaudens printed here were written eighteen years later, when the sculptor had come into full possession of his genius. They cover a most critical period in his career, and record his greatest artistic triumph—his recognition in France as one of the foremost of modern sculptors. After he returned to the United States in 1880 he lived and worked in New York, and by 1897 had built up a national reputation. His work was progressing under the most favorable conditions, with the encouragement of an ever-increasing circle of friends and admirers. On the other hand, in France, his father's country, where he himself had been educated, his work was practically unknown. A few of his former comrades at the Beaux-Arts, judging his sculpture from photographs, did not hesitate to tell Saint-Gaudens that it had been over-praised in America and would obtain no such appreciation in France. The sculptor felt that, in order to learn his own deficiencies and to find out where he really stood among his contemporaries, he must return to Paris, exhibit at the Salon, and run the gauntlet of the best critics. All his friends on both sides of the water discouraged him from taking this step, and he himself dreaded it; but he believed that, in justice to himself and to his work, he must make this venture.
After his decision was made, however, his departure had to be postponed until various duties were fulfilled. The Shaw and Logan monuments had first to be completed and unveiled, and a number of smaller commissions had to be executed. From the beginning of his work upon the Shaw memorial there had been bitter opposition upon the part of his friends to the symbolical figure hovering above Colonel Shaw and his men, but the sculptor clung to his original conception with great tenacity. Saint-Gaudens' best friend, Bion, a Parisian sculptor and critic, whose opinion he valued highly, had never liked the idea of this figure. Just before Bion's death he received a photograph of the monument as finished in the clay, and he wrote a long letter to Saint-Gaudens, complaining that the angel was as superfluous as a figure of Simplicity would be, floating in the air above the bent figures in Millet's "Gleaners," and concluding: "I had no need of your 'nom de Dieu' allegory on the ceiling. Your negroes marching in step and your Colonel leading them told me enough. Your priestess merely bores me as she tries to impress upon me the beauty of their action."
CARYATID FOR THE VANDERBILT HOUSE
Concerning this letter of Bion's, Saint-Gaudens wrote:
"The Players, New York,
Jan. 26th, 1897"Dear ——
"I meant to write you at length tonight but I started with a letter to Bion which has kept me busy till now, 11 P.M. It is in reply to the one from him that I enclose, in which at the end he says a word of you.
"I am not disturbed by his dislike of my figure. It is because it does not look well in the photograph. If the figure in itself looked well, he would have liked it, I know, and notwithstanding his admirable comparison with the Millet I still think that a figure, if well done in that relation to the rest of the scheme, is a fine thing to do. The Greeks and Romans did it finely in their sculpture. After all it's the way the thing's done that makes it right or wrong, that's about the only creed I have in art. However his letter is interesting, although very sad, dear old boy.
"All of the Shaw is out of the studio. They cast the Logan on Monday and I am working like the devil on the Sherman. I've found precisely the model I wished, just his size, the same pose of the head and the same thinness; a Milanese peasant who poses like a rock. Next week I commence the nude of the Victory from a South Carolinian girl with a figure like a goddess.
"Affectionately yours
A. St.-G."
DETAIL FROM THE SHAW MEMORIAL, SHOWING THE ALLEGORICAL FIGURE FULL FACE, AS IN THE FIRST DESIGN