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Updated: June 19, 2025
The boy was already a determined person; he believed that he had suffered an injustice, and, though Avet went to his parents and tried to induce them to send him back, he refused to return. A new master was found for him in the person of a shell-cameo cutter named Jules LeBrethon, and with him Saint-Gaudens remained three years.
Saint-Gaudens did a new thing; altho there had been standing statues and seated statues, no sculptor had ever before designed a figure just rising from his seat. It is by victories like these over technical difficulties that the arts advance; and it is in combats like these that the true artist finds his pleasure.
His father, Bernard Paul Ernest Saint-Gaudens, was a shoemaker from the little town of Aspet in Haute-Garonne, only a few miles from the town of Saint-Gaudens, from which the family must have drawn its origin and its name. His mother was Mary McGuinness, a native of Dublin.
In his youth he began his student life in art with the great Augustus Saint-Gaudens, attending also Cooper Union, New York. Each year has seen him move successfully ahead until now he is among our finest American sculptors. He is one who stimulates the imagination and raises the standards of art in whatever he models.
This explanation may give some measure of what I mean when I say that I believe Augustus Saint-Gaudens the most complete master of relief since the fifteenth century.
But the great and true artist is more than a benefactor of his country, he is a benefactor of the human race. The body of Saint-Gaudens is ashes, but his mind, his spirit, his character have taken on enduring forms and are become a part of the inheritance of mankind.
The heads are superb in characterization, strikingly varied and individual, yet each a strongly marked racial type, unmistakably African in all its forms. Saint-Gaudens. These are merits, and merits of a very high order, enough of themselves to place the work in the front rank of modern sculpture, but they are, after all, its minor merits.
Saint-Gaudens had lived through the time of the Civil War, had felt, as a boy, the stir of its great happenings in his blood, and its epic emotions had become a part of his consciousness, deep-seated at the roots of his nature.
I knew Saint-Gaudens first through Joe Evans, an artist who, while he lived, was to me and to my daughter the dearest of all in America. His character was so fine and noble his nature so perfect. Many were the birthday cards he did for me, original in design, beautiful in execution. Whatever he did he put the best of himself into it. I wrote to my daughter soon after his death:
It was like a child's funeral, I am told, and all his American friends seem to have been there Saint-Gaudens, Taber, etc. A poem about the dear fellow by Mr. Gilder has one very good line in which he says the grave 'might snatch a brightness from his presence there. I thought that was very happy, the love of light and gladness being the most remarkable thing about him, the dear sad Joe."
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