Commissioned by his descendants, “The Puritan (Deacon Samuel Chapin),†1883‸6, honored one of Springfield, Mass.’s early settlers, visibly a man of determination and piety. Stanford White designed the circular granite base and the surrounding landscape. Statuettes of this stalwart figure became the most commercially successful of Saint-Gaudens’s reductions.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848‱907), the greatest American sculptor of his day and arguably the nation’s finest sculptor ever, melded classical and modern styles in public statuary of enduring interest and importance. His creative genius and deep sense of humanity contributed to works of timeless and universal appeal.

From humble beginnings, Saint-Gaudens used cosmopolitan experience, energetic ambition and prodigious talent to change the course of American sculpture from a conventional classic aesthetic to a vibrant, naturalistic style based on his French Beaux-Arts training, and from marble to bronze as the preferred material for sculpture.

The most visible and accomplished American sculptor of his day, he played a major role in the nation’s cultural life, becoming friends with a wide range of movers and shakers, many of whom became clients, and participating in progressive artists’ organizations.

As head of sculpture at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, Saint-Gaudens helped perpetuate the French Beaux-Arts tradition in America through the City Beautiful Movement. He did much to popularize sculpture in the United States by encouraging Americans to commission small pieces and by producing editions of his own works. His “Farragut Monument” was a seminal aspect of the evolution of American sculpture and, with Theodore Roosevelt, he transformed US coinage.

Saint-Gaudens joined President Theodore Roosevelt in trying to produce coins as attractive as those from ancient times, notably in $10 and $20 gold pieces. The sculptor also designed (and his assistant Adolph Alexander Weinman modeled) a “Theodore Roosevelt Special Inaugural Medal†celebrating the launch of Roosevelt’s second term in 1905. The obverse is a straightforward profile of the president, accompanied by the Latin motto for “to each what is equitable.†On the reverse of the 1905 “Theodore Roosevelt Special Inaugural Medal,†Saint-Gaudens portrayed a proud and powerful eagle posed on a rock, flanked by the motto of the seal of the United States, E PLVRIBVS VNVM †”Out of many, one. 

“Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” on view through November 15, celebrates the museum’s grand trove of the master’s work and related loans.

Curated by Thayer Tolles, the museum’s associate curator in the department of American painting and sculpture, the exhibition traces Saint-Gaudens’s illustrious career through some nearly four dozen works: cameos and medals, portrait busts and reliefs, and statuettes relating to major civic monuments. They confirm the sculptor’s exalted reputation and the enduring popularity of his oeuvre.

Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin, Ireland. His father was a shoemaker from the village of Aspet in the French Pyrenees, and his mother was Irish. Six months later, the family moved to New York City, where the future sculptor grew up.

Finishing his schooling at 13, Saint-Gaudens served a six-year apprenticeship with a French cameo-cutter while taking classes at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design on the side. On view in the exhibition is an early shell cameo of New York lawyer “John Tuffs,” circa 1861, a posthumous image that reflected Saint-Gaudens’s skill in carving a challenging three-quarter pose.

At 19, after finishing his apprenticeship with a thorough knowledge of his craft and brimming with confidence, Saint-Gaudens studied at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, working at cameo-cutting to pay expenses. He also executed his first major work, “Hiawatha,” 1871‷2, inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem.

Following the lead of several prominent American sculptors and inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s iconic “The Song of Hiawatha,†in 1871‷2 Saint-Gaudens designed a marble “Hiawatha,†his first large-scale sculpture. It shows the Chippewa chief seated nude on a rock pondering the fate of his people. Its weathered appearance is the result of being displayed outdoors for many years on an estate in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., before being given to the Met.

Fleeing the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Saint-Gaudens spent five years working in Rome. His outlook and skills matured during this time, and his warm personality attracted a wide circle of both American and foreign friends, some of whom became patrons and supporters. In Rome, the sculptor met his future wife, Augusta F. Homer of Roxbury, Mass., an art student distantly related to Winslow Homer. Their son, Homer, became a museum director and art writer.

At 27, Saint-Gaudens returned to the United States, his creativity expanding, as were his contacts. “Not only was he talented,” says Tolles, “but he possessed an abundance of charm and an intrinsic gift for friendship that reaped him enormous professional benefits.”

He worked briefly as a mural painter with John LaFarge, and established close and lasting friendships with rising architects Charles McKim and Stanford White.

A turning point in Saint-Gaudens’s career and the opening of a new era in American sculpture came when he won the much-sought-after commission to create the statue of Admiral David Glasgow Farragut in 1876. It is admired to this day for its union of statue and base (designed by White) and an exedra that encourages passersby to participate in saluting the great Civil War admiral. A bronze bust of the gallant admiral, included in the show, closely resembles the final statue, which still stands in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park.

The success of the “Farragut Monument” led to a series of public commissions that included two monuments to Abraham Lincoln, represented by a bronze head and bronze casts of his hands and a life mask used by Saint-Gaudens in modeling the statues. A bronze statuette of “The Deacon (Deacon Samuel Chapin),” 1883‸6, for Springfield, Mass., shows the resolute Chapin, an early settler, striding across the New England wilderness headed for Springfield. The base is by White.

Saint-Gaudens’s collaborations with other artists and architects, particularly on public monuments, advanced the Beaux-Arts tradition of harmoniously meshing sculpture, painting and architecture. The sculptor’s partnership with White on the “Adams Memorial” in Washington’s Rock Creek Cemetery resulted in perhaps the most moving personal memorial in this country.

Saint-Gaudens, working with interior decorator John LaFarge, designed this magnificent “Vanderbilt Mantelpiece,†circa 1881‸3, for Cornelius Vanderbilt’s enormous mansion at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, which was demolished around 1926. It features two caryatids, Amor and Pax, supporting the mosaic overmantel. The richly modeled mantel includes the Vanderbilt crest in the left medallion and, in the right medallion, the family coat of arms.

The memorial, a universal image of contemplation and grief, commemorates the life of Marian (“Clover”) Adams, who had committed suicide. Commissioned by her husband, philosopher/historian Henry Adams, to mark his and his wife’s gravesite, Saint-Gaudens fashioned a shrouded figure in bronze, her face resting on her right forearm and gazing enigmatically. She is seated on a rough-hewn block of fieldstone set against a rectangular block of polished red granite designed by White. The whole is enclosed in a bower of shrubs and beneath a canopy of trees, creating a bosky enclave of contemplation. The fact that the memorial has never had a name adds to its aura of isolation and mystery.

During his 30-year career, Saint-Gaudens carried out more than 200 commissions, of which some 20 are monuments and 150 are portraits, of which 80 are reliefs. His command of delicate line, handling of accessories and detail and the vitality of surfaces made him a rare master of relief sculpture. Most were shoulder-length profile portraits, with sketchy naturalistic modeling, an approach considered “unfinished” in academic circles. Saint-Gaudens included objects, such as a palette and brushes for painters, to put his sitters in context, and decoratively lettered tributes to his subjects. “These compact reliefs,” says Tolles, “not only deftly record the sitters’ physical appearance, but also project psychological impressions of them.”

Saint-Gaudens achieved an early success with a multifigured relief of journalist Richard Watson Gilder, his artist-wife Helena and their 2-year-old son, Rodman, and a more detailed profile of Rodman, excerpted from the family relief, both in 1879. The Gilders brought Saint-Gaudens into their social circle of writers and artists, and Richard touted the sculptor’s work, becoming his “greatest trumpeter,” according to Tolles.

Other notable low-relief portraits in bronze and marble included artists William Merritt Chase, Francis Davis Millet and John Singer Sargent, financier and Met founder Samuel Gray Ward, Mrs Stanford White in her wedding gown, art critic Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, author Robert Louis Stevenson and First Lady Frances Folsom Cleveland. These sensitively modeled likenesses continue to be admired for their sense of form, individualizing attributes and astute inscriptions.

The only female nude in his oeuvre, Saint-Gaudens modeled the figure of “Diana,†1892‹3, to top the tower of Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden, then the highest point in New York City. This gilded bronze version, cast for the Met in 1928 and standing nearly 102 inches tall, is modeled on the 13-foot statue that was atop the Garden, 1893‱925, and is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Saint-Gaudens’s genius in combining portraiture and relief in public monuments culminated in what some consider the greatest of all such pieces, the “Robert Gould Shaw Memorial” of 1897. Commissioned by the Shaw family, it honors the young Boston Brahmin, a colonel who led the Massachusetts 54th Regiment of African American volunteers in an attack on Fort Wagner, S.C. Almost the entire unit was killed, including Shaw.

This striking monument †nearly 15 feet high, 18 feet wide and 3 feet deep †consists of a bronze relief of Colonel Shaw on horseback and his black troops resolutely marching beside him. An allegorical figure floats overhead, holding laurel, symbol of victory over death. The deep relief motif enabled the sculptor to show the striding troops, several abreast, ranging from shallow, flattened figures in the background to high-relief figures in the foreground to the full-bodied, freestanding equestrian portrait of Shaw in front. As sculpture historian Donald Martin Reynolds observes, “One cannot help but be intensely aware of those virtues that Saint-Gaudens valued most †love, charity and courage.”

The African American portraits in the “Shaw Memorial” are based on the sculptor’s indefatigable efforts, over the course of the 14 years it took to complete the memorial, to record the physiognomies of some 40 heads modeled from life. Thus, each black figure is a study of a unique human being, a far cry from the stereotypes in much of the art of the time. “The black portraits in the Shaw Memorial constitute a sculptural group neither equaled nor excelled by any American artist&‬” says Reynolds, “they comprise the most important study of a unique human being who happens to be black.”

The “Shaw Memorial” is represented in the exhibition by four individualized African American head studies and a large-scale photo mural. The original cast can be seen on the edge of Boston Common opposite the State House, with individualized African American portrait heads and a gilded version at the National Gallery Art and other heads and another version at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, N.H.

Saint-Gaudens authorized bronze casts of “Head of Victory,†1897‱903, derived from a study for the final head of “Victory†on the “Sherman Monument.†As show curator Thayer Tolles observes, “Victory†”wears a crown of laurel on her head and holds a palm branch in her left hand. In the final monument, ‘Victory’ leads Sherman to battle and ultimately to peace; together they surge forward †cape, gown and horse’s tail billowing dramatically. 

The Met’s plaster portrait of “Davida Johnson Clark,” 1886, suggests the allure of this frequent model and Saint-Gaudens’s longtime mistress, who bore him a son. “A tall, strikingly beautiful woman, Clark possessed the physical attributes associated with men: strong arms, broad shoulders, sturdy nose and firm jaw,” says art historian David M. Lubin. A sense of androgyny marks the various angels and goddesses that Saint-Gaudens based on her, including his famed “Amor Caritas,” 1880‹8, and the notorious “Diana,” 1893‹4.

The Roman goddess of the hunt and of the moon was depicted by the sculptor in an 18-foot and later 13-foot gilt sheet-copper weathervane for the top of the tower of White’s Madison Square Garden, making it New York’s highest point. In spite of her elevated location, lithe, nude “Diana” drew the ire of New York bluenoses, who objected to her presence, to no avail. The exhibition includes a 6½-foot gilt-bronze version and an elegant statuette, both modeled 1893‹4.

Saint-Gaudens’s last major public memorial, the gilded-bronze “Sherman Monument,” 1892‱903, on the Grand Army Plaza in Manhattan, shows famous Union commander General William Tecumseh Sherman on horseback, led by a winged classical “Victory” placed on a pedestal designed by McKim, Mead and White. On view in the exhibition are a bronze bust of Sherman, modeled from life in 1888, a bronze “Head of Victory,” 1897‱903, and a gilt-bronze statuette, “Victory,” 1892‱903.

The show includes examples of Saint-Gaudens as master medalist, including high-strike versions of the acclaimed US $10 and $20 gold coins, designed at the request of friend and admirer President Theodore Roosevelt. Closing the exhibition are two etchings of the sculptor by Anders Zorn, oil portraits by Kenyon Cox and Ellen Emmet Rand and a bronze bust by Saint-Gaudens’s onetime assistant, John Flanagan.

“Augustus Saint-Gaudens,†1886, this replica, 1908, by his friend, Kenyon Cox, shows the sculptor at work in his 36th Street, New York City, studio on his bas-relief portrait of William Merritt Chase. It conveys the vigor and intensity of the artist as he applies a wad of clay to his depiction. Cox painted this larger version after his first canvas was destroyed in the 1904 fire in Saint-Gaudens’s Cornish, N.H., studio.

In between frequent trips to Europe, Saint-Gaudens maintained homes/studios in New York City until 1897. “Aspet,” which is now the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Site, was his summer residence, 1885‱897, and his permanent home, 1900‱907, when he died. Built around 1800 as an inn, the sculptor remodeled the Federal-style house, painting brick walls white and adding a spacious, columned porch with a grand view of Mount Ascutney. Today, the house contains original furnishings and decorative objects that reflect his lifestyle and tastes.

Members of the talented Cornish Art Colony, many attracted by Saint-Gaudens, included artists Kenyon Cox, Thomas W. Dewing, Willard Metcalfe, Charles A. Platt and Stephen and Maxfield Parrish; sculptors Herbert Adams, James Earle Fraser, Frederic MacMonnies, Paul Manship, and his brother, Louis Saint-Gaudens, and authors Witter Bynner, Winston Churchill and Percy MacKaye. Painter George deForest Brush lived in a tepee on the grounds of “Aspet.”

The capacious, carefully designed grounds include the white-columned Little Studio, Saint-Gaudens’s personal workshop, which contains a number of low relief works. Elsewhere on the property are full-size versions of the “Farragut Monument,” the Shaw memorial and the “Adams Memorial,” the gallery showcasing more works, and the Ravine Studio, where the master worked occasionally.

The Met exhibition is a superb reminder of the varied talents of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, an American original, whose accomplishments are unequalled in the nation’s art. The 80-page Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin for Spring 2009 serves as the exhibition catalog.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is at 1000 Fifth Avenue. For information, 212-535-7710 or www.metmuseum.org .