Irish-born Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who died 100 years ago, is responsible for some of the most famous US monuments, and his statue of Parnell is an intrinsic part of Dublin, writes Eileen Battersby.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin
coloured girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces
Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked negro infantry
on St Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the
garage's earthquake.
Two months after marching through
Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the
bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.
- from For The Union Dead, by Robert Lowell
Robert Shaw was the beloved son of a wealthy Boston family. He had been to Harvard; a life of great ease had been his for the asking. But the American Civil War intervened. Shaw became the colonel of the Union's 54th Massachusetts Regiment. His men were black volunteers; some of them had once been slaves. In the summer of 1863, some two months after leaving Boston, bound for the battlefields of the south, Shaw and most of his men were viciously overwhelmed at Fort Wagner, South Carolina. Their bodies were buried in a mass grave; Shaw's grieving parents never recovered. They wanted their son immortalised and in 1884 approached a young sculptor who was then 36 and considered a visionary.
The artist was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who died 100 years ago, on August 3rd 1907, and left a lasting mark on Dublin. This American sculptor with a French name was 13 in 1861 when the Civil War began and he had seen President Lincoln and the troops marching off to battle. Later, Saint-Gaudens referred to the war as a period of "intense excitement". Patriotism dictated his artistic sensibilities: "I have such respect and admiration for the heroes of the Civil War that I consider it my duty to help in any way to commemorate them in a noble and dignified fashion worthy of their great service." The Shaw commission followed two major works: the monument of Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, the American Nelson, hero of the battle of New Orleans; and the majestic Standing Lincoln, depicting the 16th US president, in familiar pose with hand on lapel, preparing to deliver a speech.
When the Farragut memorial was unveiled in Madison Square, New York on May 31st, 1881, it was hailed by a leading art critic as "the best monument of the kind the city has to show". Saint-Gaudens was an artist whose craft was enhanced by his perceptive intelligence and the importance he placed on his subject's character as well as the architectural details including surroundings and approach. He would become the first and remain the dominant figure in 19th century American public art.
The Shaw memorial honoured a much loved son and an American hero, Robert Shaw, the Harvard boy. But it was the first time an American sculptor had been commissioned to represent blacks as heroes, sharing the nobility and resolve of their white leader. It was also the first American monument to a group rather than an individual. Saint-Gaudens hit on an inspirational form - he had one hero on horseback and the others followed on foot, in a procession taking the shape of a classical frieze.
"Gold horse, gold rider, gold goddess," writes art critic Robert Hughes in his exhilarating study of US art, American Visions (1997), "High on a plinth, they stand at the south-east edge of Central park in New York, just in from the creeping traffic of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street.
"Together, they commemorate the crushing of the Confederacy by the Union, in the Civil War . . . It represents General William Tecumseh Sherman on his horse, leading the Union troops through Georgia . . . The horse is trampling on pine fronds and cones, symbols of Georgia. Superbly modelled, it advances with the remorseless animal power of Saint-Gaudens' 15th century Renaissance prototypes . . . Ahead of it walks Nike, the goddess of victory, holding up a palm . . . Not a smile, or even an expression of triumph: a grimace, almost . . . Her face, bare as a hand, is as strange and ambiguous as the closed warrior face of Sherman above . . . She is an implacable and angry Victory, a terror to the losers, not a congratulation to the winners."
Saint-Gaudens elevated US public sculpture from the mediocre to the sublime by drawing on the formal and conceptual energies of the Italian Renaissance. No less than five of America's finest monuments - and this in a country slow to erect memorials - are by him. Who was he? The Dublin-born son of a French shoemaker, who was to leave Ireland with his wife when the future artist was only six months old.
Bernard Saint-Gaudens was born on June 26th, 1816 in Aspet, a village in the Pyrenees, near the town of Saint-Gaudens. He trained as a shoemaker, left France and arrived in Dublin, where he worked in a shoe factory. There he met Mary McGuinness from Co Longford. They married. Their first child, Augustus, was born on March 1st, 1848 at the height of the Famine.
Within six months the family had emigrated, initially arriving in Boston, to settle six weeks later in New York, where Bernard discovered an eager market for his "French ladies boots and shoes". Two additional sons were born.
Having experienced the New York public-school system, Augustus, at 13 and considered talented, was apprenticed to the cameo-cutter Louis Avet, who was French and knew his father. Three years later he moved on to work for another cameo cutter, Jules Le Brethon. In 1867 Saint-Gaudens set off for Paris with the support of his proud parents to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. He did well in Paris, helped by his fluent French and his enthusiasm. There he met John Singer Sargent and a lasting friendship was formed. They exchanged works and Saint-Gaudens made a bronze medallion of the head of 24-year-old Singer Sargent. The École training, with its emphasis on modelling, anatomy and design as well as an awareness of historical examples, made Saint-Gaudens an artist. Paris taught him to see, while his study of French and Italian Renaissance art helped him develop a concept of beauty and of the ideal. The influence of John Ruskin also proved vital.
THE OUTBREAK OF THE Franco-Prussian War in 1870 cut short his student days in Paris. Many of his class mates enlisted in the French army. Saint-Gaudens, however, moved to Rome and became an independent sculptor. By then he was already well experienced at bas-relief and had executed many works in this genre, as well as bronze and plaster busts and heads. In time, his output included portraits as well as themed commissions. He was in demand by many American tourists in Rome interested in plaster and bronze portraits and plaques. In 1871 he returned to New York and completed a commission for the Masonic Temple.
The following year he began teaching cameo cutting to his younger brother, Louis, who would in time work with him. The brothers returned to Rome where Saint-Gaudens met his future wife, Augusta Homer. They married in June 1877. Their only child, Homer, was born on September 29th, 1880.
Aside from his major war memorials in New York, Boston and Chicago, Saint-Gaudens is also famous for works such as: the plaster bas-relief of Mildred and William Dean Howells, in which the novelist and his daughter appear to be deep in conversation; the Whistler Memorial; and, as many US school children would immediately identify, The Puritan, the large bronze of a founding father which stands in Springfield, Massachusetts and was later reworked for the city of Philadelphia, as The Pilgrim. Serialisations of editions of his bas-reliefs, begun with his Robert Louis Stevenson - one of which is in the Hugh Lane gallery - were popular.
Ireland meant somethingto Saint-Gaudens. It was his mother's country. She died in 1875. His father lived on until 1893. Although Saint-Gaudens knew Paris and France well, he was 50 when he finally visited Aspet, his father's birthplace. Although an emotional man and prone to depression, Saint-Gaudens was not prepared for the effect it had on him.
"It is impossible for me to describe my emotions upon arriving at the village I had heard my father speak of so frequently and at seeing my name over a door at the head of a little street." The Saint-Gaudens home in Cornish, New Hampshire, is called Aspet. It was always an artistic colony and the artist's widow, Augusta, was anxious that it would become a New Hampshire historic site. Following her death in 1927, further land was donated to the property and by 1962 Aspet was designated as a national historic landmark eligible for inclusion within the National Park system of the United States. It remains open to the public.
His work testifies to his vision as well as his love of his country and of things beautiful; he believed in courage, honour, character and the responsibility of an artist.
"There is nothing as ridiculous or as lasting," he once said, "as a bad statue." He only made great ones.
