If the name Saint-Gaudens does not mean anything to an Irish person, one of his works, which stands at the north end of O'Connell Street in Dublin, will, writes Eileen Battersby.
The last public monument Saint-Gaudens saw to completion was the one honouring Charles Stewart Parnell. The Parnell Monument Committee was formed in 1898 and the cornerstone was laid in October 1899. The committee then sought an accomplished sculptor, preferably one of Irish descent.
Saint-Gaudens, then in Paris, was approached by letter. Within two weeks he had accepted, but would not begin until the commission was confirmed. By late 1900 he was working on sketches, although the contract was not signed for a further two years. Although he planned two trips to Dublin to see the intended monument site, he never returned to the city he had left as an infant. His health had already begun to fail.
By March 1903, Thomas Baker, chairman of the committee, unaware that Saint-Gaudens was terminally ill, complained that the artist had not visited the site. The artist requested site photographs. He also constructed a scale model of the site and asked for "every imaginable photograph good, bad and indifferent" of Parnell and had Parnell's Dublin tailor prepare a suit "from the original pattern you used". In May 1903, Thomas Baker visited Saint-Gaudens at his country home in Cornish, New Hampshire, to finalise the contract which stipulated that the artist would be paid $25,000 for the monument.
A New York architect, Henry Bacon, was asked by Saint-Gaudens to design the architectural elements. The 57-foot tall stone obelisk, placed behind the Parnell figure, bears the famous words "No man has the right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation; no man has a right to say to his country thus far shalt thou go and no further." On September 30th, 1904, John Redmond visited Cornish and inspected the statue which he said was "the best likeness he had ever seen of the dead leader". Less than two weeks after that visit, a fire broke out destroying the large studio, and all but the head of the Parnell statue. Saint-Gaudens was in New York. Luckily, the photographs and architectural plans had been kept in the smaller studio. Saint-Gaudens set about replicating the statue.
The colon cancer that would kill him worsened and much of the physical work was executed under his direction by assistants. On June 7th, 1907, Parnell was sent to Ireland on board the SS Baltic, arriving six weeks before the sculptor's death, on August 3rd, 1907, aged 59.
Completion of the architectural elements and foundation took a further four years and the Parnell monument as we see it today was unveiled on October 1st, 1911.
