Augustus Saint-Gaudens

His father cut and stitched shoes in Dublin, and the family sailed for New York when Augustus was six months old. He apprenticed to a cameo-cutter at thirteen, taking evening classes at Cooper Union, then apprenticed to a second cutter while enrolling at the National Academy of Design. At nineteen he crossed to Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under François Jouffroy, then moved on to Rome in 1870, where he took his first paid commissions and began teaching himself to think in monuments rather than trinkets. Nothing in a cameo-cutter's apprenticeship explained what came next: within a decade he was the country's most sought-after sculptor of the dead.

A New York veterans' committee commissioned a memorial to Admiral David Farragut in 1876, and its unveiling in Madison Square Park in 1881 made his reputation. He spent fourteen years, on and off, on the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common, the bronze of Shaw and his Black regiment now ranked among the finest American sculptures of the century. He cast Sherman on horseback for Central Park, carved two Lincolns, and in his last years designed the twenty-dollar gold Double Eagle for the U.S. Mint, a coin still called one of the most beautiful the country ever issued. He founded an art colony at his New Hampshire summer home in Cornish that drew painters and sculptors for a generation.

He married Augusta Homer, a fellow art student, in 1877, and their household in Cornish looked, from the outside, like a settled artistic marriage. It was not entirely one. For years his model and mistress Davida Johnson Clark posed for Diana and for Amor Caritas, and she bore him a son the family did not publicly acknowledge as his. He worked at a pace that ran through his health: a studio fire in 1904 destroyed years of correspondence and unfinished work, and in 1900 he was diagnosed with cancer, which he kept largely private while continuing to take on major commissions, including a seat on the federal commission that redesigned Washington, until close to the end.

Saint-Gaudens died at his Cornish home on August 3, 1907, and the estate itself became the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, still open to visitors. He trained a generation of sculptors who carried his methods forward, among them James Earle Fraser, Frederick MacMonnies and Adolph Weinman. The Cornish Art Colony scattered within a few years of his death, but the coin design he considered his hardest work outlived every monument: numismatists still rank the Double Eagle among the most admired coins the United States Mint has ever struck, and it stayed in production, in modified form, for decades after he was gone.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Admiral David Farragut Memorial artwork
  Unveiled in Madison Square Park and made his reputation 1881
• Abraham Lincoln: The Man artwork
  The Standing Lincoln, in Chicago's Lincoln Park 1887
• Diana artwork
  Weather vane for the second Madison Square Garden 1893
• Robert Gould Shaw Memorial artwork
  Fourteen years in the making, on Boston Common 1897
• William Tecumseh Sherman Monument artwork
  Equestrian bronze at the entrance to Central Park 1903
• Saint-Gaudens double eagle other
  Twenty-dollar gold coin design for the U.S. Mint 1907

• 1861 aged ~13 Apprenticed to a cameo-cutter in New York at thirteen Attended evening classes at Cooper Union alongside the apprenticeship.
• 1867 aged ~19 Sails for Paris and enrolls at the École des Beaux-Arts
• 1870 aged ~22 Moves to Rome and takes his first paid commissions
• 1876 aged ~28 Commissioned to sculpt the Farragut Memorial
• June 1, 1877 aged 29 Marries Augusta Homer
• May 25, 1881 aged 33 The Farragut Memorial is unveiled in Madison Square Park
• 1897 aged ~49 Unveils the Shaw Memorial on Boston Common
• 1900 aged ~52 Diagnosed with cancer He kept working on major commissions, including the McMillan Plan for Washington, D.C., for most of the years that remained.
• August 3, 1907 aged 59 Dies at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire

• Daniel Burnham 1846–1912
  Architect and planner whose City Beautiful vision shaped downtowns, civic centers, and urban planning. collaborated on the McMillan Plan with
• William Tecumseh Sherman 1820–1891
  Union general whose campaigns through Georgia and the Carolinas helped destroy the Confederacy’s capacity to wage war. sculpted the equestrian monument to
• David Farragut 1801–1870
  The U.S. Navy's first admiral, whose victories at New Orleans and Mobile Bay were decisive in the Civil War. sculpted the memorial that made his name for
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. sculpted two monuments to