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Updated: June 19, 2025
Augustus Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin, Ireland, on the first day of March, 1848, but was brought to America at the age of six months. His childhood and youth were passed in the city of New York, as was a great part of his working life; and though his origin was foreign, lifelong associations had stamped him indelibly an American.
And the first and most essential thing to note about the art of Augustus Saint-Gaudens is that it is always art of the purest free in an extraordinary degree from the besetting sins of naturalism and the scientific temper on the one hand and of the display of cleverness and technical brilliancy on the other.
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.
When the Franco-Prussian War broke out Paris ceased to be a place for the carrying on of the serious study of art, and Saint-Gaudens went to Rome, where his associates were the French prizemen of the day, of whom Mercié was one.
Saint-Gaudens, having made "The Standing Lincoln" with such success, was given the opportunity for a new presentation of this great theme. "The Seated Lincoln" has a soul-stirring expression of figure and countenance; the crumpled shirt, the square-toed shoes, the well-known shawl draped upon the chair, are not more real than the simple greatness of soul that somehow expresses itself throughout.
This studio was given up when Saint-Gaudens went abroad for the third time, in 1897, to execute the Sherman group, and he never resumed his residence in New York.
First of all, by nature and by training, Saint-Gaudens was a designer, and exquisiteness of design was the quality he most consciously strove for the quality on which he expended his unresting, unending, persevering toil.
Death and Duty Victory and Peace in each case the compound ideal found its expression in a figure entirely original and astonishingly living: a person as truly as Shaw or Sherman themselves. He could not have left them out. It were better to give up the work entirely than to do it otherwise than as he saw it. Plate 32. Saint-Gaudens.
This is the imagination of the portrait-painter, and Saint-Gaudens has shown it again and again, in many of his reliefs and memorial tablets, above all in his portrait statues.
Saint-Gaudens gave me a cast of his medallion of Bastien-Lepage, and wrote to a friend of mine: "Bastien had 'le coeur au métier. So has Miss Terry, and I will place that saying in the frame that is to replace the present unsatisfactory one." He was very fastidious about this frame and took such a lot of trouble to get it right.
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