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McCLURE'S MAGAZINE

FAMILIAR LETTERS OF AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS

EDITED BY ROSE STANDISH NICHOLS

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

These familiar letters from Augustus Saint-Gaudens show the artist as his intimate friends knew him. They were written at odd moments, often in haste, and never with a shadow of self-consciousness. They are interesting, not as literary productions, but as the simple record of a critical period in his career.

"Le Coeur au M?tier," the motto which he wished to place in his studio, will be seen to express the spirit of his life. Other keen interests he had, but they were never allowed to interfere with his work, and he seldom felt the need of any recreation apart from it. One of his friends used to complain that in the midst of their merrymaking an abstracted look would come into his eyes and his mind would hark back to sculpture. Although he was extremely modest and was given to underrating his powers in other directions, from his childhood he confidently expected to be a great artist. As a little school-boy, sent from his father's shop to do errands, he would sit in the omnibus and look about at his well-dressed fellow-passengers, and wonder what they would think if they realized what he was going to be some day. But even as a child he never dreamed of achieving his ambition without years of ceaseless struggle.

When the boy left school, at the age of thirteen, this struggle began. In 1848 his father, a Frenchman, had brought his Irish wife and his baby, Augustus, to New York, where he worked as a shoemaker. He was poor, and was anxious that his eldest son should become self-supporting as soon as possible; so at thirteen the boy was apprenticed to a cameo-cutter, whose trade he mastered with surprising readiness, at the same time studying drawing at the Cooper Institute in the evenings. In a little while he was not only earning his own living by cameo-cutting, but excelled all his fellow-pupils at the night-school in talent and perseverance.

Saint-Gaudens' artistic education was completed in Europe, where he went at the age of eighteen and stayed almost continuously for nearly fourteen years. His father sent him first to Paris. There his progress in the art schools was marked, although he continued to support himself by his trade, and could give only half his time to sculpture. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War he reluctantly refrained from enlisting in the French army and left for Italy. It was in Rome that he first found sculpture remunerative, and finally was able to drop cameo-cutting. The years from 1866 to 1880, which he spent in Rome and Paris, with only occasional visits to America, were singularly happy ones, characterized by a capacity for continuous work at a high pitch of excellence.

The letters from Saint-Gaudens printed here were written eighteen years later, when the sculptor had come into full possession of his genius. They cover a most critical period in his career, and record his greatest artistic triumph--his recognition in France as one of the foremost of modern sculptors. After he returned to the United States in 1880 he lived and worked in New York, and by 1897 had built up a national reputation. His work was progressing under the most favorable conditions, with the encouragement of an ever-increasing circle of friends and admirers. On the other hand, in France, his father's country, where he himself had been educated, his work was practically unknown. A few of his former comrades at the Beaux-Arts, judging his sculpture from photographs, did not hesitate to tell Saint-Gaudens that it had been over-praised in America and would obtain no such appreciation in France. The sculptor felt that, in order to learn his own deficiencies and to find out where he really stood among his contemporaries, he must return to Paris, exhibit at the Salon, and run the gauntlet of the best critics. All his friends on both sides of the water discouraged him from taking this step, and he himself dreaded it; but he believed that, in justice to himself and to his work, he must make this venture.

After his decision was made, however, his departure had to be postponed until various duties were fulfilled. The Shaw and Logan monuments had first to be completed and unveiled, and a number of smaller commissions had to be executed. From the beginning of his work upon the Shaw memorial there had been bitter opposition upon the part of his friends to the symbolical figure hovering above Colonel Shaw and his men, but the sculptor clung to his original conception with great tenacity. Saint-Gaudens' best friend, Bion, a Parisian sculptor and critic, whose opinion he valued highly, had never liked the idea of this figure. Just before Bion's death he received a photograph of the monument as finished in the clay, and he wrote a long letter to Saint-Gaudens, complaining that the angel was as superfluous as a figure of Simplicity would be, floating in the air above the bent figures in Millet's "Gleaners," and concluding: "I had no need of your 'nom de Dieu' allegory on the ceiling. Your negroes marching in step and your Colonel leading them told me enough. Your priestess merely bores me as she tries to impress upon me the beauty of their action."

Concerning this letter of Bion's, Saint-Gaudens wrote:

"The Players, New York, Jan. 26th, 1897

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