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Updated: June 19, 2025
Something of this imaginative quality there is in almost everything Saint-Gaudens touched, even in his purely decorative figures. His angels and caryatides are not classical goddesses but modern women, lovely, but with a personal and particular loveliness, not insisted upon but delicately suggested.
To the boyish Saint-Gaudens Sherman had seemed the typical American hero. To the matured artist he had sat for an admirable bust. The sculptor had thus an unusual knowledge of his subject, a perfect sympathy with his theme; and he has produced a work of epic sweep and significance.
Some part of the vivid and lovable personality of Augustus Saint-Gaudens must have been visible, almost at a glance, to any one who ever came in contact with him to any one, even, who ever saw his portrait. In his spare but strong-knit figure, his firm but supple hands, his manner of carrying himself, his every gesture, one felt the abounding vitality, the almost furious energy of the man.
One is by the once favorite thought-promoting summer seat of Augustus Saint-Gaudens on his own home acre in Vermont; the other I need not particularize further than to say that it is one of the things which interlock and unify a certain garden and grove. The ravine of the three fish pools.
The "Great Power" that is over us does seem unmindful of us as individuals, if it does not seem positively against us, as Saint-Gaudens seemed to think it was. Surely the ways of the Eternal are not as our ways. Our standards of prudence, of economy, of usefulness, of waste, of delay, of failure how far off they seem from the scale upon which the universe is managed or deports itself!
And this sensitiveness and delicacy of workmanship, this mastery of the problems of relief, with its reliance on illusion and its necessary abstention from realization, is applied to sculpture in the round, and becomes with Saint-Gaudens, as it did with the sculptors of the Florentine Renaissance, the means of escape from the matter of fact.
Saint-Gaudens and the rest did their work as well as though the buildings were to endure for centuries instead of being burned in a year to save the trouble of pulling down! The World's Fair always recalled to me the story of Michael Angelo, who carved a figure in snow which, says the chronicler who saw it, "was superb."
And above them, laden with poppy and with laurels, floats the Death Angel pointing out the way. Plate 30. Saint-Gaudens. It is a work which artists may study again and again with growing admiration and increasing profit, yet it is one that has found its way straight to the popular heart. It is not always it is not often that the artists and the public are thus at one.
Since the passing of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French has been regarded by many as standing at the head of American sculpture. He was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1850. After having one year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he studied with Doctor Rimnier of Boston, the first teacher of art anatomy in the United States.
One millionaire's house is modelled on a French château, another on an old Colonial house in Virginia, another on a monastery in Mexico, another is like an Italian palazzo. And their imitations are never weak or pretentious. The architects in America seem to me to be far more able than ours, or else they have a freer hand and more money. The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens
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