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Updated: May 28, 2025
Only when the infantry comes swinging by do I grow wild with the desire to wear a conspicuous uniform and die for my country. Saint-Gaudens's man on horseback in the Shaw memorial is beautiful, but it is the forward-lunging line of negro faces and the line of muskets on shoulder that threaten to bring the tears to my eyes. This, I suppose, is rank sentimentality; but I cannot help it.
Yet, perhaps, Saint-Gaudens's greatest works are two in which all the varied elements of his genius find simultaneous expression; into which his mastery of composition, his breadth and solidity of structure, his technical skill, his insight into character, and his power of imagination enter in nearly equal measure: the "Shaw Memorial" and the great equestrian group of the "Sherman Monument."
If, then, the accusation that Saint-Gaudens's art is not sculptural means that he was a designer rather than a modeller, that he cared for composition more than for representation, that the ensemble interested him more than the details, I would cheerfully admit that the accusation is well founded.
There had always been individual sculptors of power and originality in France, but the movement of the French school of sculpture, as a whole, away from the pseudo classicism which had long dominated it was really inaugurated by Paul Dubois only a few years before Saint-Gaudens's arrival in Paris.
The time of Saint-Gaudens's study in Paris was a time of great importance in the development of modern sculpture, and, although Jouffroy was not himself a sculptor of the highest rank, his studio was a centre for what was then the new movement in the sculpture of France.
The commonest criticism on Saint-Gaudens's art has been that it is not, primarily, sculptural in its inspiration; and, in a sense, the criticism is justified. One need not, perhaps, greatly care whether it is true or not.
But if Saint-Gaudens's imagination was thus capable of raising the portrait to the dignity of the type, it was no less capable of endowing the imagined type with all the individuality of the portrait.
Saint-Gaudens's mastery of low relief was primarily a matter of this power of design, but it was conditioned also upon two other qualities: knowledge of drawing and extreme sensitiveness to delicate modulation of surface.
An informal funeral service was held in his private studio on August 7, attended by friends and neighbors and by a few old friends from a distance; but the gathering could include but a few of the many who felt his death as a personal loss. The merits of Saint-Gaudens's work were fully recognized in his lifetime.
There are various bronzes in the house: Saint-Gaudens's "Puritan," a token from my staff officers when I was Governor; Proctor's cougar, the gift of the Tennis Cabinet who also gave us a beautiful silver bowl, which is always lovingly pronounced to rhyme with "owl" because that was the pronunciation used at the time of the giving by the valued friend who acted as spokesman for his fellow-members, and who was himself the only non-American member of the said Cabinet.
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