AUGUSTUS SAINT GAUDENS. 859 



AUGUSTUS SAINT GAUDEXS (1S4S-1907). 



Fellow of Class IH, Set-tion 4, 1896. 



Born in Dublin, Ireland, on the first day of March 1848, the son 

 of an Irish mother and a French father, Augustus Saint Gaudens, 

 brought to this country at the age of six months, lived to see himself 

 acclaimed as the foremost of American sculptors. His bent for 

 artistic expression first took the form of cameo-cutting by which he 

 practically supported himself from the time he was thirteen till he 

 was twenty and to which he occasionally turned for revenue during 

 his course of art study abroad, — in Paris at the Academic dcs Beaux 

 Arts from 1867 to 1869 and in Rome from 1869 to 1872. His first 

 important work of a public character was the statue of Admiral 

 Farragut erected in Union Square, New York, in 1881. This work 

 was instantly hailed as a masterpiece and the test of thirty -five years 

 upholds the judgment of the moment. 



Saint Gaudens' fame dates from this time and was augmented by 

 his later productions, — the Lincoln in Chicago, the Shaw in Boston, 

 the Adams ^Memorial in Washington and the Peter Cooper and the 

 equestrian statue of Sherman in Xew York,— =- all on the same high 

 plane of excellence and all with an appeal so general as to win the 

 applause and interest of the man in the street as well as of the artist 

 and the connoisseur. 



The success of Saint Gaudens as a sculptor of heroic works was 

 equaled by his skill in portrait relief. One has but to recall the 

 Stevenson Memorial, and the children of Mr. Jacob H. Schift' to 

 acknowledge his supremacy in this domain. His treatment of the 

 medallion, as exemplified in the portraits of Sargent and LaFarge, of 

 Howells and Gilder, of ^Millet and Bunce established a precedent for 

 an attractive form of the art that bids fair to be followed (probablx' at 

 a respectful distance) for all time. 



The art of Saint Gaudens is unique. Although it possesses the 

 qualities of technique and composition, of truth to nature and respect 

 for traditions that are common to all good art, his style is so personal, 

 the technique is so entirely his own, and his conceptions are so original 

 that we are hardly reminded of any preceding master in looking at 

 them. To everything that he did, he gave the best that was in him 

 with a thoroughness born of conscientiousness and of devotion to the 



