Saint-Gaudens, Augustus

Saint-Gaudens, Augustus (b Dublin, 1 Mar. 1848; d Cornish, NH, 3 Aug. 1907). The leading American sculptor of his period. His parents (a French father and an Irish mother) settled in America when he was a baby. He began his career as a cameo cutter in New York, then studied for three years in Paris (1867–70) and three in Rome (1870–3), returning to America in 1874. His first important commission was the Admiral Farragut Monument (1878–81) in Madison Square Park, New York, and following its successful reception he quickly achieved a leading reputation among American sculptors and retained this throughout his life. Saint-Gaudens had great energy and he produced a large amount of work in spite of the high standards of craftsmanship he set himself. His preferred material was bronze and he excelled particularly at memorials. Although his style is generally warmly naturalistic, his most celebrated work, the Adams Memorial (1886–91) in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, is a powerful allegorical figure. It is a monument to a wife of a friend of Saint-Gaudens who had committed suicide, and the mysterious female figure, swathed in magnificent voluminous draperies, has been interpreted as ‘Grief’, although the sculptor himself saw the elegiac work as embodying ‘the Peace of God’. Saint-Gaudens was a highly important figure in the development of American sculpture; he turned the tide against Neoclassicism and made Paris, rather than Rome, the artistic mecca of his countrymen. From 1885 he spent his summers at Cornish, New Hampshire, and settled there in 1900; his studio was declared a national historic site in 1964. Casts of most of his works can be seen there.