The American Rodin: Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the Met

Nicolaus Mills on Augustus Saint-Gaudens

FOR VISITORS to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Augustus Saint-Gaudens is a familiar figure. His “Diana,” a gilded bronze version of the 1894 nude archer that served as the weathervane on top of Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden, dominates the sculpture garden of the Met’s Charles Englehard court. On the east wall of Englehard court, Saint-Gaudens is represented by the two caryatids, “Armor” and “Pax” that he sculpted in the 1880s for the gigantic mantelpiece of Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s mansion on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street in New York.

But in the Met’s new Saint-Gaudens show, which runs until November 15, we are reminded that Saint-Gaudens, who early in his career studied in Paris and Rome and in the 1890s became friends with Rodin, was not only an establishment figure sought after by the rich and famous. He was also the artist who did the most to make the Civil War’s grim heroism comprehensible to America. Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture has the realistic power of Matthew Brady’s Civil War photography, but Saint-Gaudens provides, in a way Brady never did, a window into the inner lives of those who waged that war for the North.

In his poem, “For the Union Dead,” Robert Lowell wrote of Saint-Gaudens’s most famous work, the Shaw Memorial, a high and low relief of Colonel Robert Shaw and the black troops of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, “Its Colonel is as lean/ as a compass needle./ He has an angry wrenlike vigilance/ a greyhound’s gentle tautness.” Lowell’s poem focuses on Shaw, who, along with many of his troops, died in the assault on Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor in 1863.

What is striking about the memorial, which was unveiled in 1897 and sits in the Boston Common, is not just the care that Saint-Gaudens took with his depiction of Shaw. Equally revealing, as the Met show demonstrates with the models used to create the memorial, is the care that Saint-Gaudens took in depicting Shaw’s black troops (two of them Frederick Douglass’s sons). Saint-Gaudens has made the troops’ determination and individuality just as striking as Shaw’s. They are not foils for his heroism. In their march toward death, they are Shaw’s self-conscious partners, possessed of a dignity few Northerners, including Boston’s abolitionists, ever conceded.

A similar complexity emerges in the Met exhibit from the model of the head of Lincoln that Saint Gaudens sculpted for the monumental Lincoln statue (eleven feet, six inches) that he did for the 1887 opening of Chicago’s Lincoln Park. In contrast to Daniel Chester French’s Washington Lincoln Memorial, which features a seated, white marble Lincoln who looks down as if he were God, Saint-Gaudens’s “Standing Lincoln” is a wholly human figure, reminiscent of the Lincoln who in his second Inaugural reminded Americans that during the war both sides prayed to the same God and invoked His aid against the other.

Saint-Gaudens’s Lincoln takes little pleasure in the power he wields. On the verge of speaking, he tightly grips the left lapel of his coat and looks downward; his face deep in thought. What Saint-Gaudens has captured is a president struggling to find the right words for a solemn occasion. Soon his Lincoln will look up to face his audience, but for the moment he exists in a world all his own—in a place where no one can reach him or reduce the burdens he carries.

Most revealing of all in the Met exhibit is the bronze model of the head of General William Tecumseh Sherman that Saint-Gaudens did for his last great monument, the gilded bronze equestrian statue of Sherman that sits at the southeast corner of Central Park across from the Plaza Hotel. With a classical Victory leading the way and his horse trampling pine cones representative of the defeated South, Saint-Gaudens’s Sherman appears to embody American triumphalism at its worst.

But Sherman’s ravaged face, his stubbly beard and pursed lips, defy the stereotype of him as a general without a conscience. We get instead the Sherman who in his famous 1864 “March to the Sea” warned the mayor and city council of Atlanta that their petition for him to stop his siege of Atlanta was futile, telling them, “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it . . . . the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride.”

In 1888, it took eighteen, two-hour sessions for Saint-Gaudens to get Sherman’s head completed to his satisfaction, and when, during one of the sittings, he asked Sherman to button his collar and straighten his tie, the latter replied, “The General of the Army of the United States will wear his coat any damn way he pleases.” To his credit, Saint-Gaudens never made another attempt to correct Sherman. He let Sherman’s combination of anger and pride at having done what he believed essential dominate his Sherman monument.

After a full-size model of the horse and rider of the Sherman Monument were displayed to great acclaim in 1899, Saint-Gaudens wrote his son, “I got a swelled head for the first time in my life for the Sherman really looks bully and is smashingly fine. . . . Occasionally I fall on my knees and adore it.”

It was a unique moment for Saint-Gaudens and the United States. Five years after the unveiling of the Sherman Monument, Saint-Gaudens was dead of intestinal cancer, and not until the end of Second World War would America’s generals take such dark satisfaction in bringing all-out war to their enemies’ homelands.

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and with Michael Walzer, co-editor of the newly published Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq.

Photo: Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s “Sherman” in New York City’s Grand Army Plaza(Jim Henderson / Wikimedia Commons)