After Augustus Saint-Gaudens: his memorial exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

This year marks the centenary of the death of the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. His passing on August 3, 1907, at age fifty-nine, after a seven-year struggle with cancer, drew international notice. Lengthy obituaries in newspapers and journals universally labeled him the greatest sculptor in the history of American art and frequently invoked the word genius. Hundreds of condolence letters were sent to his widow, Augusta, and their son Homer (1880-1958), saluting the French-Irish immigrant who became the most accomplished American sculptor of the Beaux-Arts era. (1) A simple funeral--attended by family, close friends, and studio assistants--was held on August 7 in Cornish, New Hampshire, where since 1885 Saint-Gaudens had spent summers, and after 1900 lived year-round. (2)

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Although Saint-Gaudens's illness prevented him from sculpting very much in his final years, he continued to accept selected commissions, making small sketches and directing his studio assistants on enlarging and refining clay models. At the time of his death, assistants at the Cornish studio--Frances Grimes (1869-1963), Henry Hering (1874-1949), and Elsie Ward (1871-1923)--continued to work on well-advanced commissions, among them the Phillips Brooks Monument, 1896-1907 (Copley Square, Boston), a bronze statue of the longtime rector of Trinity Church attended by the figure of Christ set within a canopied architectural setting designed by Stanford White. (3) With large-scale projects such as these to complete and deliver to impatient committees, as well as Augusta Saint-Gaudens's well-orchestrated campaign to cast posthumous reductions after her husband's sculptures for steady income, authorized estate production of the sculptor's work continued through the early 1920s.

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During the weeks immediately following Saint-Gaudens's death, his admirers initiated efforts to fittingly memorialize him, resulting in several years of sustained hero worship borne out through exhibitions, a rash of publications, and other forms of testimonial. Richard Watson Gilder (see Fig. 13), the powerful editor of the Century magazine and a steadfast champion of the sculptor, offered to organize a memorial service in New York City and wrote a requiem for the family. (4) In November the writer and critic Royal Cortissoz (1869-1948), another loyal partisan, issued an illustrated monograph saluting the artist's role in upholding the classical tradition, which he deemed "a wholehearted expression of my affection and admiration." (5) The National Sculpture Society, of which Saint-Gaudens was a founding member in 1893, mounted an exhibition of photographs of his work and held a memorial meeting on November 12.

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But the most ambitious plans were led by Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), not only the other great American civic sculptor of the era but also a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City since 1903. As chairman of the trustees' committee on sculpture, French was involved in negotiations with the Saint-Gaudens family for the completion of three marble bas-relief portraits of children that the museum had ordered from the artist in 1905 (see Fig. 5). French's frequent contact with Augusta and Homer Saint-Gaudens during this process resulted in his formulating a plan--with their full cooperation--to hold a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum (see Figs. 2 and 3). Marshaling the organizational resources, personnel, and gallery space of the museum, French masterminded the most ambitious exhibition of an American sculptor held to date, from its conception in the middle of October to its opening in early March 1908. In just a few months, French, with the able backing of the museum's assistant secretary Henry Watson Kent (1866-1948), brokered the assembly of 154 works and the publication of an accompanying catalogue on a budget of approximately ten thousand dollars. This remarkable feat (especially when measured against the years of preparation and staggering budgets of today's large traveling museum exhibitions) is meticulously documented in correspondence held in the Metropolitan Museum Archives and in the Saint-Gaudens Papers at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Collectively these letters reveal an intense loyalty to Saint-Gaudens on the part of his patrons and fellow artists and their willingness--even eagerness--to participate in the commemorative efforts. As Charles W. Gould (1849-1931), a lender to the exhibition, attested: "I knew and liked St. Gaudens very much and feel that anything I can do to express my regards, while it will be trifling no doubt, will be a most pleasant duty." (6)

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French's first action was to assemble the Saint-Gaudens Memorial Committee, a group composed of representatives from the major arts organizations in New York City, as well as prominent sculptors, leading cultural figures, and ex-officio representatives of the Metropolitan Museum. (7) These men--the likes of John La Farge (1835-1910), John Quincy Adams Ward (1830-1910), and Francis Davis Millet (1846-1912)--were not only leading luminaries of turn-of-the-century American art, but all had close personal relationships with the artist. Following the first committee meeting on October 31, its members--eventually numbering twenty-four--were tasked with specific responsibilities. A finance subcommittee led by lawyer Frederick S. Wait (1851-1910) raised funds through private subscription. Other members located objects, brokered loans, and suggested names of Saint-Gaudens admirers who might help fund the exhibition. For instance, the architect Charles Follen McKim (1847-1909) successfully appealed to Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II (nee Alice C. Gwynne; 1845-1934) to borrow two bas-relief bronze panels and to photograph the marble caryatids from Saint-Gaudens's mantel in the billiard room of her Fifth Avenue house (the mantel is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Others fanned out to inspect works in houses, churches, and civic buildings. Some yielded loans, such as when Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke (1846-1911), the museum's director, visited Saint-Gaudens's early allegorical figure of Silence (see Fig. 7) at the Masonic Hall in New York City. Others proved disappointing: the sculptor James Earle Fraser (1876-1953) found unsalvageable polychrome plaster fragments from the reredos (1877) of Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, which had burned in 1905.