Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848‱907) was a French Irish immigrant who became the greatest American sculptor of his day. From humble roots, through his prodigious talent and effort, he rose in society, counting some of America’s most influential people in art and literature, diplomacy and economics, technology and social policy among his friends and clients.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Saint-Gaudens collection contains nearly four dozen works from early cameos to innovative painterly bas reliefs to character-penetrating portrait busts and statuettes derived from his public monuments. These unparalleled holdings are supplemented with loans from private collections and public institutions for the exhibition “Augustus Saint-Gaudens in The Metropolitan Museum of Art” at the museum, June 30⁏ctober 12.
The exhibition addresses the artist’s groundbreaking position in the history of late-Nineteenth Century American sculpture, his role in advancing American art on the international stage and the long history of collecting and presenting his work by the Met.
Organized thematically within a chronological framework, the exhibition begins with some of Saint-Gaudens’s earliest-known works, completed during his apprenticeships to two French émigré cameo cutters. The earliest work in the exhibition †a convincingly rendered cameo portrait of the lawyer John G. Tuffs from around 1861 †already suggests the young artist’s skill. From 1867 until 1870, Saint-Gaudens was among the first generation of American artists to study in Paris.
He continued to carve cameos and also modeled copies of antique busts when he moved to Italy, where he created his first full-length, life-size marble sculpture, “Hiawatha” (modeled 1871‷2, carved 1874).
Saint-Gaudens vowed to “astonish the world,” and, indeed, he sold this unique sculpture to Edwin D. Morgan, a former governor of New York. “Hiawatha” will be shown near the Erving and Joyce Wolf Gallery where the exhibition is mounted, in the Charles Engelhard Court, along with four other large-scale works by the artist.
In the late 1870s and early 1880s Saint-Gaudens worked on a series of low-relief portraits in bronze and marble for friends and clients. A monumental marble, mosaic and cast iron mantelpiece from the mansion of Cornelius Vanderbilt II (1881‸3), also on view in the Charles Engelhard Court, represents one of Saint-Gaudens’s major interior projects.
Saint-Gaudens’s last major public memorial was the Sherman Monument (in Grand Army Plaza, New York City). In this gilded-bronze equestrian monument General William Tecumseh Sherman is led on his horse by a winged classicized “Victory.”
The exhibition features three works that relate to the project: a bronze bust of General Sherman modeled from life (1888, cast 1910); a bronze Head of Victory (1897‱903, cast 1907); and the gilt-bronze statuette Victory (1892‱903, cast 1912 or after [by 1916]), reduced after the full-sized figure.
Also included will be a section on Saint-Gaudens as a master medalist. A highlight will be the high-strike versions of United States $10 and $20 gold coins, considered by many to be the most beautiful examples of American currency ever struck. The exhibition will close with images of Saint-Gaudens by other artists: two etchings by Anders Zorn (1897 and 1898); two oils †one by Kenyon Cox (1887, replicated 1908) and Ellen Emmet Rand (around 1904); and a bronze bust by Saint-Gaudens’s one-time assistant John Flanagan (1905′4, cast 1924).
The Metropolitan is at 1000 Fifth Avenue. For information, www.metmuseum.org or 212-570-3951.
