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Vaguely seeking a clue, he wandered through the art exhibit, and, in his stroll, stopped almost every day before St. Gaudens's General Sherman, which had been given the central post of honor. St. Gaudens himself was in Paris, putting on the work his usual interminable last touches, and listening to the usual contradictory suggestions of brother sculptors.
But for all its ancestral strength of feature, it was a face from which will had been extracted, and lacked the fire and fanaticism, the indomitable hardness it should have proclaimed, and which have been so characteristically embodied in Mr. St. Gaudens's statue of the Puritan. His clothes were slightly shabby, but always neat.
Gaudens's correctness of taste or feeling; so that, as the spring approached, he was apt to stop there often to see what the figure had to tell him that was new; but, in all that it had to say, he never once thought of questioning what it meant. He supposed its meaning to be the one commonplace about it the oldest idea known to human thought.
It has the essential characteristics of the portrait, but so combined with the attitude of the artist that the figure stands as much more than a portrait, having in it something more living, more typical, deeper than the mere outward mould of the man. St. Gaudens's Farragut has the bearing of a seaman, balanced on his two legs, in a posture easy, yet strong.
But the most powerful influence in the recent development of American sculpture has been that great artist, Augustus Saint Gaudens. Born in 1848, at Dublin, Ireland, of a French father and an Irish mother, he was brought to this country while still an infant. Perhaps this mixed ancestry explains to some degree Saint Gaudens's peculiar genius.
Gaudens's symbol for 'Grief'. But we have other evidence too which shows abundantly that these Olympian gods are not primary, but are imposed upon a background strangely unlike themselves. For a long time their luminous figures dazzled our eyes; we were not able to see the half-lit regions behind them, the dark primeval tangle of desires and fears and dreams from which they drew their vitality.
"Most of the good ones were," was the laughing rejoinder of an artist. "At least that is the way it seems. And nearly all the pedestals for them were made by Stanford White." In query and response there is a certain amount of justice. It is Augustus St. Gaudens's benevolent presentment of Peter Cooper that stands within the little park enclosed by Cooper Square. The name of St.
What a splendid straightforward and simple fellow he is," said Stevenson; and St. Gaudens's comment after their first meeting was: "Astonishingly young, not a bit like an invalid and a bully fellow." Stevenson readily consented to sit for his portrait, and they spent many delightful hours together while the sketches were being made for it.
But for all its ancestral strength of feature, it was a face from which will had been extracted, and lacked the fire and fanaticism, the indomitable hardness it should have proclaimed, and which have been so characteristically embodied in Mr. St. Gaudens's statue of the Puritan. His clothes were slightly shabby, but always neat.
It is the spiritual quality of Saint Gaudens's work which sets it apart upon a lofty pinnacle the largeness of the man behind it, the artist mind and the poet heart. Saint Gaudens's death in 1907 deprived American art of one of its most commanding figures, but there are other American sculptors alive to-day whose work is noteworthy in a high degree. One of these is Daniel Chester French.
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