Daniel Chester French and the sculpture of Augustus Saint-Gaudens - New York Metropolitan Museum

Two months after the sculptor's death, the Saint-Gaudens Memorial Committee was formed for the purpose of organizing a retrospective exhibition at the museum. The committee of twenty-four, headed by French and including ex-officio members representing the museum, was composed of distinguished citizens and artists, all close friends or associates of Saint-Gaudens. Although the exact composition of the committee varies from list to list, it is known to have included Kenyon Cox, Richard Watson Gilder, John La Farge, Francis Davis Millet, and the sculptors Herbert Adams, Karl Bitter, Charles Grafly, John Quincy Adams Ward, and Saint-Gaudens's brother Louis. Through private subscriptions the committee raised more than ten thousand dollars to mount the exhibition. They appealed to private owners for loans and tracked down the long missing marble of the seated Hiawatha of 1872-1874, among other examples of the artist's work. The committee also funded a plaster replica of Saint-Gaudens's Farragut Monument of 1877-18 80 in Madison Square Park in New York City, which had launched his reputation. With the cooperation, and occasional intervention, of the sculptor's widow, Augusta (1848-1926), the committee assembled 154 objects fully representative of Saint-Gaudens's oeuvre, ranging from cameos to medals, and bas-reliefs to busts. Many sculptures were still in the hands of their original owners, including portraits of William Maxwell Evarts of 1872-1873, Rodman de Kay Gilder of 1879, and Mrs. Stanford White of 1884, all of which have entered the museum's collection in recent years.

The Memorial Exhibition of the Works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens was on view from March 3 to May 31, 1908, in the Hall of Sculpture (now the Great Hall; see Figs. 4, 5). It was the first special exhibition at the museum since the memorial show of the work of Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) in 1900. [8] By all accounts it was a great success, for the closing date was twice extended, museum hours were lengthened, and the number of visitors vastly increased. More than five thousand people attended the private opening, and the catalogue went into a second printing. Installed amidst potted plants and tapestries, the display filled the entire hall and included plaster casts of the Sherman Monument; The Puritan of 1883-1886 in Springfield, Massachusetts; and the bronze Seated Lincoln of 1897-1906, destined for Grant Park in Chicago. At French's behest, Kenyon Cox painted a replica of his 1887 portrait of Saint-Gaudens (P1. VII) that had burned in a disastrous fire in the sculptor's studio in Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1904. The replica was financed by a smaller committee led by August F. Jaccaci (1857-1930), an artist and writer. It so pleased Cox that he declared it "a work that I may be content to rest my reputation on as far as that side of my art is concerened." [9]

After the exhibition the Saint-Gaudens Memorial Committee raised money to commission bronze casts for the museum's collection, and subscription letters from French appealed for contributions of ten to one hundred dollars. In 1910, after extensive deliberations, the committee settled on four bronzes to be cast from Saint-Gaudens's original plasters: busts of the Civil War heroes Admiral Farragut (Pl. II) and General Sherman (Fig. 2), and two of the more celebrated bas-reliefs Jules Bastien-Lepage (P1. IV) and Robert Louis Stevenson (Pl. III). Each portrait reveals Saint-Gaudens's considerable ability to penetrate character. That the virile Sherman and the sensitive Stevenson were modeled contemporaneously was often remarked upon during the artist's lifetime. In the relief of the painter Jules Bastien-Lepage, the sculptor's mature style is evident in the easy flow between figure and space, the profile pose, decorative inscription, and attributes of the sitter's profession.