CHAPTER TWELVE

THE FARR AGUT

His whole soul is in his art.

—AUGUSTA HOMER SAINT-GAUDENS

I

Augusta Homer, an art student from Roxbury, Massachusetts, had been living in Rome, devoting her time principally to copying masterpieces in the Palazzo Barberini, when she met Augustus Saint-Gaudens and fell in love.

Four years later in Paris, in the summer of 1877, the newlywed couple moved into a tiny first apartment on the boulevard Pereire and set up housekeeping. “We have bought a Persian rug for which we gave 110 francs, $22.00,” she wrote to her mother. “We think our little parlor looks prettily now. We had it papered last Saturday and now we must have the floors waxed. …”

Her husband had his heart set on living in Paris. The “art current” was stronger there than anywhere, she explained to her mother, and his “whole soul” was in his art.

Once settled, she began going with him to his new studio to paint or to help him with his work. Other days she went to the Louvre, as she had to the Palazzo Barberini, to do copies.

Tall, slender, still in her twenties, she was known as “Gussie” and could be fairly described as attractive rather than pretty. She had large, clear blue eyes and, when smiling, her face turned radiant. Her mother and father had sent her abroad with one of her brothers, to Italy to pursue her ambitions in art. (A love of painting seemed to run in the family. Winslow Homer was her first cousin.) But she went, too, in the hope of improving her health. She suffered spells of fatigue and low spirits, and more seriously from increasing deafness, which also ran in the family. Her father, Thomas Homer, had written earlier of how “painful” it was to observe Gussie’s deafness steadily increasing and know of no way to help. Since meeting her “Mr. Saint-Gaudens,” she wrote, her hearing was no better, but her outlook and health had much improved.

The more she knew him, the more she liked him, she had confided in the early stages of their romance. Those at home had no idea what a sculptor’s studio was like or how the work was done, or what a “perfect marvel” it was to see it done.

And perhaps they should know what he looked like:

Medium sized, neither short nor tall, blue eyes, straight nose. … Neither handsome nor homely and when you first meet him does not impress you as particularly talented. But the more you know him the better you like him and a more upright man I never met.

“Mr. St.-G. is very much in love with me,” she announced to her mother in a letter from Rome dated February 8, 1874, and marked “PRIVATE.”

“Now I must tell you who he is,” she said, and proceeded to explain that his father was a French shoemaker in New York and poor, but that there was nothing “Frenchy” about her “Mr. St.-G.” except his name and the fact that he spoke French extremely well. She stressed how much he had accomplished in his career through his own determination, and told how he had gone to work cutting cameos at age thirteen and succeeded later in being accepted at the École des Beaux-Arts. She described his years in Rome, where again he had supported himself cutting cameos, and the statue he had done of Hiawatha, and the praise it was receiving.

Some of the most influential men in New York had taken an interest in his career, she wrote, and there seemed little doubt he would be successful ultimately. She thought he was twenty-six, or perhaps twenty-seven.

His education in everything regarding art is complete, but he occasionally makes mistakes in speaking. But he is every inch a gentleman and there is an innate refinement about him. His treatment of me has been just what a noble man ought to do and I have told him I think a great deal of him. He does not ask or wish me to make any promises for the future as it must be at least two years before he can think of it and of course I would do nothing without your and father’s sanction.

“I am not dead in love as they say, but perhaps would be if I thought I ought,” she added in conclusion.

“I am very sure that the only possible objection to him is that his father is French and his mother Irish,” she wrote in another “PRIVATE” letter. “But, mother, he is neither: an American to the backbone.”

To her New England Protestant parents, a French father and an Irish mother could only mean that the young man was a Roman Catholic. But Gussie said nothing on the subject, nor, to ease their worries, did she mention that Gus was a lapsed Catholic. That he was both a gentleman and an American, she felt, was more than sufficient qualification.

Whatever letters he may have written to her during this period have not survived. Probably they were destroyed with much else in a studio fire long afterward. Years later, however, in an uncharacteristic burst of candor about his private life, he would mention in his Reminiscences having had love affairs with five women before meeting Gussie, and that the fifth was a very “beautiful” model named Angelina with whom he had wanted to elope to Paris, but that she had been “wise enough to refuse.”

He hated writing letters, but in several addressed to Gussie’s parents, he made clear his honorable intentions and the seriousness of his feelings for their daughter. In a straightforward summary of his life thus far in which he expressed his reasons for feeling optimistic about his work, he concluded, saying, “What I have is a splendid future and a fine start.”

If successful, and with your consent, I shall claim Miss Homer’s hand immediately. If not I shall then have to delay until … I am guaranteed our future welfare. … I ask your consent to my attentions to your daughter, nevertheless leaving her completely free and binding her to nothing.

He cut her a cameo engagement ring and bought himself a new high silk hat, his first ever, and “so great was his enthusiasm,” he put it on and “promptly walked across the Piazza di Spagna in the rain, and without an umbrella,” to visit her.

“You’ll have to get used to a Gus and Gussie in the family,” she told her mother. “How does it sound to you? …” But permission for Gussie to marry him, her parents made plain, was not to be granted until he had a commission for a major work, something he had not as yet achieved.

They were naturally concerned about her happiness, but also about her future financial security. Once prosperous, they were living at a much-reduced standard, due to “reverses” in Thomas Homer’s mercantile business. They stood ready to help, of course, but the amount would have to be limited, all of which Gussie understood perfectly.

In 1875, Saint-Gaudens left Rome and returned to New York, crossing again, as he had the first time, in steerage. By telegraph en route he learned that his mother had died. It was his first great sorrow, one of the most painful moments of his life, a trial, he said, “like a great fire.”

He rented a shabby studio in the German Savings Bank Building at 14th Street and Fourth Avenue, where he also slept, his father’s house being too overcrowded as it was.

Hearing from Gussie that there was a competition for a statue of Charles Sumner to be placed in the Boston Public Garden, he decided to try for it. But his entry was rejected. (The sculptor chosen was Thomas Ball, who had done the great equestrian statue of George Washington that stood at the entrance to the garden.)

Soon after, Saint-Gaudens learned of plans to create a memorial in New York to Admiral David Glasgow Farragut—“Damn the Torpedoes” Farragut, the Civil War hero of the battle of Mobile Bay, which had resulted in the surrender of New Orleans. A committee had been formed to pick a sculptor. A sum of $9,000 was said to be available from the City of New York. Saint-Gaudens applied at once and contacted everyone he knew who might put in a word for him.

To do a man like Farragut justice in bronze would be no easy undertaking. The admiral had had as long and distinguished a career as any officer since the founding of the U.S. Navy. The son of a naval officer, he had gone to sea with the navy at age ten, even briefly commanded a captured ship at the age of twelve. Serving on ships of the line, he had seen much of the world before he was twenty.

He was resourceful and intelligent—without benefit of formal schooling, he learned to speak French, Italian, Spanish, and Arabic—and above all, courageous. By the outbreak of the Civil War he had served in the navy nearly fifty years. When assigned to capture New Orleans, he commanded the largest fleet to have sailed under the American flag, and at the war’s end he became the first man ever to hold the rank of full admiral in the U.S. Navy.

“I have made two models, a large drawing and a bust,” Saint-Gaudens wrote to Gussie’s mother. “As far as I can see I am in a fair way to have the commission.”

His career and his marriage were riding on it. And he got it.

Of the $9,000, he was to receive $2,000 on signing the agreement, $3,000 on completion of the statue in clay, $2,000 when the statue was cast in bronze, and a final check for $2,000 on delivery of the finished work to New York.

In an account book later he would record, “On hand June 1, 1877 when I was married, [$]2,821.00.”

He and Gussie were married at her family home on Winthrop Street in Roxbury. Two days later they were at sea on the steamer Abyssinia—and no steerage this time—on their way to a honeymoon in Paris and the start of work on “the Farragut.”

Paris was essential to the work, Gus felt, not only because the “art current” ran stronger there, but because sculpture as an art form was taken more seriously than at home, and experienced craftsmen—plaster molders, foundrymen, and the like—were plentiful. The project at hand was greater and more challenging by far than anything he had ever undertaken, and he would need the best help he could get.

II

As an American bride in Paris, she was something of a rarity, even with the great numbers of young Americans in the city, and she was doing her best to adapt to her new role. He knew French; she did not. He knew Paris; she did not, and at this point she knew almost no one else in the city.

Her health improved. Gus said it was the wine. She thought freedom from worry was the reason. He worked most of the time in his studio near the Arc de Triomphe. She tried to keep busy. She painted at the Louvre, went shopping for gloves at Le Bon Marché. On a night when they attended the opera, she marveled at the grand stairway and tried to imagine the glittering Paris social life she had heard so much about. “I wish someone would invite us to a big party or reception,” she wrote to her mother. “I should like to wear my wedding dress. …”

Only think there are twenty-four families in this house who use the same entrance we do and twelve who use the same staircase [she wrote in another letter], and although we have been here more than three months we do not know by sight anyone but the family whose door is directly opposite ours. Doesn’t it seem kind of strange?

“Aug keeps wracking his brain all the time to think of something good and original,” she reported.

He also took time to report to her parents on her health, to kid about the weight she had put on, and to express his gratitude for their financial help. “While Gussie is wrestling with the preparations for dinner, I’ll try and wrestle with a letter,” he began one evening in the fall of 1877. “She eats more, sleeps more, walks more, talks as much … [as] I have seen her in three years.”

You write splendid letters to her and the best part … is when you tell her, “Don’t work too hard.” She is inclined that way. … She manages to be occupied all the time and I wish we could fix it so she might be able to paint more. She can give you some lessons in cooking, if you wish any. First rate soups, first rate mackerel, first rate everything in fact … she takes care of the inner man splendidly. …

I am much obliged to you, Mr. Homer—“much obliged” expresses very mildly how much I thank you for all you are doing and have done in regard to my finances. …

The following spring, they moved to a larger, more beautiful, partially furnished apartment in a choice location, No. 3 rue Herschel on the Left Bank, just off the boulevard Saint-Michel and less than a block from the Luxembourg Gardens. It was all they could wish for: on the fourth floor with a fair-sized parlor and tall French windows, two bedrooms, a dining room, kitchen, a servant’s room upstairs, and a balcony off the parlor with nothing blocking the view of the gardens and the towers of the Church of Saint-Sulpice. In her letter to her parents reporting the news, she drew a plan on a separate sheet of paper. She and Gus could hardly believe their good fortune.

They found additional furniture at bargain prices—two brass-studded Louis XVI chairs, a handsome carved chest said to be three hundred years old—and bought “a beautiful Japanese matting” to cover one wall in the parlor from floor to ceiling.

Gussie set up her easel and painted two interior studies of the apartment and took time to write long descriptive letters to her family, her love of Paris and her happiness overflowing.

You have no idea how beautiful the view is from my windows this morning [July 25, 1878]. The air is clear and everything is very lovely. I watch my plants on the balcony just as father does his pear trees. My geranium has two buds. The calla is putting out a new leaf. …

Oddly, when invitations came for evening events hosted by other Americans, “Aug,” as she called him, would go while she remained at home like “Cinderella.” Late hours left her feeling “not very bright” the next day, she explained. But it may also have been that she was self-conscious about her hearing and the fact that she spoke so little French.

Gussie’s younger sister, Eugenie (“Genie”) Homer, arrived in the autumn for a stay in Paris. Then Gus’s younger brother Louis became one of the household.

Gus was devoted to Louis and had done all he could for him since boyhood in New York when he had been Louis’s protector from bullies. He had long encouraged Louis in his own ambitions to become a sculptor, first by teaching him how to cut cameos. Later, Louis had joined Gus in Rome, where he proved himself both a hard worker and talented. But in June 1876, Louis had disappeared. For two years no one knew his whereabouts, until suddenly in 1878 Gus heard he was in London and in desperate straits. Gus made a quick trip from Paris to rescue him.

Louis said only that he had been married to an American girl and that she had died in childbirth. He was also in financial trouble and appeared to have a drinking problem.

Gussie agreed to take him in—as her sister Genie wrote, Louis “tucked himself” into the servant’s room upstairs. Gus put Louis to work in the studio, glad to have his help and his company on the job. Everyone was happy with the arrangement, it seems, including Gussie, who wrote of Louis, “He is certainly the easiest person to have in the house and it’s very pleasant all around.”

One of the few surviving letters by Bernard Saint-Gaudens, the father, reached Paris later that fall. It was addressed to his “Dear Children.” “Let Louis judge now of my anxiety during all of the time he left us without sending us news,” he began.

However, I forgive you so long as you continue in the way you say you have marked for yourself in the future. For I say to you my dear son you will never find any peace for your soul and mind excepting in work. That is the only true source of our welfare. Through work the soul aspires to God who bestows upon it a power of will and wisdom which nothing can overthrow. …

Working as never before and needing more space, Gus had leased a huge barnlike studio on the Left Bank at 49 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, at the center of a growing community of American artists. By cutting through the Luxembourg Gardens, he found, he could get from the apartment to the studio in twenty minutes or less.

A painter, unless working on a huge mural, rarely needed the help of others and comparatively little in the way of equipment and material beyond paint, brushes, palette, and canvases. But a sculptor, and especially one undertaking a monumental project, needed great space for others on the job and all manner of clay, sacks of plaster, ladders, scaffolding, and tools. A sculptor’s studio was a workshop.

The new studio had once been a public dance hall, and with fourteen windows overhead, each ten feet square, there was plenty of light. But Gus decided everything had to be whitewashed—ceiling, walls, woodwork— to make the light better still. With room to spare, he told some of his favorite painter friends to set their easels “high up” on the balcony formerly used for the orchestra. One of them, Maitland Armstrong, remembered being amused “by the alternate waves of exaltation and despair that swept over Saint-Gaudens as he worked,” and how, when somebody would break out in a song, the rest would join in and Gus especially.

For additional help on the Farragut, besides brother Louis, he hired Will Low, who also became a consistent guest at dinner. As Gussie explained to Genie, “He hasn’t a cent.”

She kept the accounts, paid for everything, kept close records of what Gus gave Louis or loaned to some of the old friends who came around, like Alfred Garnier.

“Gus lent Garnier $5.00,” reads one entry. “Gus gave Louis [$]5.00. Odds and ends for studio [$]2.00.”

She also paid the monthly rents—$350 for the apartment, $465 for the studio—and recorded when Garnier and others paid back what they owed.

In addition to the Farragut in its various stages, which Gus positioned at the center of the studio, he was busy with a number of low reliefs in clay, and had still another project of importance under way.

Before leaving New York for Paris, he had been asked to help with the new Trinity Church in Boston. Henry Hobson Richardson, the architect chosen to design the church, had assigned the decoration of the interior to a gifted artist, John La Farge, who in turn had recruited Saint-Gaudens to assist him. Like Saint-Gaudens, Richardson was a product of the École des Beaux-Arts, and was emerging as one of America’s most brilliant architects. La Farge, too, had studied in Paris, though briefly, and Saint-Gaudens jumped at the chance to work with both of them. (He would later call LaFarge “a spur to higher endeavor equal if not greater than any other I have received.”) On the eve of Saint-Gaudens’s departure for Paris, La Farge had asked him to do an altar screen, a sculptured panel of angels in high relief, for St. Thomas Church in New York. Now this, too, occupied long hours in the Paris studio.

Two others of importance who had worked on Trinity Church and thus became friends of Saint-Gaudens were architects Charles McKim and Stanford White. Still in their twenties, they had since left Richard-son’s employ—McKim to start his own firm, White to see something of the world. Saint-Gaudens liked them both, but particularly White, whose high spirits and humor, uninhibited love of art and architecture and music, seemed as limitless as his energy.

White had grown up in New York in an atmosphere of art and music and books. His father was a recognized authority on Shakespeare, a composer and cellist. As a boy, Stanford had shown exceptional talent for drawing and painting, but La Farge, a friend of the family who was constantly short of money, had warned that as an artist he would have trouble supporting himself, and told him to take up architecture. So at age nineteen he went to work as an apprentice to Richardson.

He and Saint-Gaudens had met first in New York. White was climbing the cast-iron stairway in the German Savings Bank Building one day when he heard a strong tenor voice at full volume singing the Andante of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Deciding to investigate, he found Gus at work in his studio.

The friendship with Charles McKim came a little later, and according to Saint-Gaudens, it was their “devouring love of ice cream” that brought them together.

Early in 1878, hearing that White was planning a trip to Europe, Saint-Gaudens wrote to say he was “pegging away” at the Farragut, but that the limited interest of his subject’s clothing made the job “a hard tug.” From the point of view of sculpture, Saint-Gaudens disliked modern clothing. Here he had only a cap, sword, field glasses, belt, and buttons to work with—not much, he lamented, adding, “When you come over I want to talk with you about the pedestal. Perhaps something might be done with that.”

White’s response came at once, “I hope you will let me help you with the Farragut pedestal. … Then I should go down to Fame, even if it is bad, reviled for making a poor base for a good statue.” In June, White reported he was on his way to Paris and that McKim was coming, too.

They arrived in midsummer, 1878, and after extended discussions with the sculptor in his crowded “ball-room studio,” and much conviviality with Gus, his wife, and friends—dining at Foyot’s, a favorite restaurant of students beside the Luxembourg Gardens, seeing Sarah Bernhardt in Racine’s Phèdre—they succeeded in convincing Gus it was time he took a break and head off with them to the south of France.

Gus was itching to go. As he wrote long afterward, there had been, before White’s arrival, “little of the adventurous swing of life” he had once known in his student days.

Gussie encouraged him to go, apparently. It seems the only thing she ever flatly said no to was his wish that they get a dog.

The stated purpose of the expedition was to look at Gothic and Roman architecture along the Rhône. “It’s really a business trip,” she assured her mother. They were to be gone less than two weeks and traveling third-class.

So, as Saint-Gaudens wrote, the “three red-heads” started on their way. (White, in addition to a thick, reddish-brown mustache, had close-cropped red hair that stood straight up as stiff as a brush. And though McKim had little hair left on top of his head, it, too, was red.) Their route was from Paris by train to Dijon, Beaune, and Lyon, then by boat from Lyon down the Rhône to Avignon, Arles, Saint-Gilles, and Nîmes; then back northward over the mountains by diligence to Langogne, Le Puy, and to Bourges, Tours, and Blois, then back to Paris by way of Orléans.

In letters to his mother White described Dijon as clean and cheerful. Beaune, besides the beauty of the town itself, could be said to have “good wine and pretty women.” Most enjoyable was moving with the swift current of the Rhône. The boat was a side-wheel steamer with a single, tall stack and built on the lines of a canal boat. “[It] is 275 ft. long and not over 20 ft. wide, comme ça,” White wrote, and drew a sketch. “She holds about two hundred passengers. …”

Avignon, with the remains of the ancient Pont d’Avignon and the enormous Palace of the Popes, both dating from feudal times, was much the most impressive spectacle on the river. Years later Saint-Gaudens would remember arriving at Avignon after nightfall, and as he walked the narrow streets, hearing “the sound of a Beethoven sonata floating from an open window into the warm summer night. …”

Stanford White thought the portal of the twelfth-century Church of Saint-Gilles “the best piece of architecture in France.” It was later to be the inspiration for a porch he designed for St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York.

At Nîmes they visited the great Roman amphitheater with its seating capacity of 20,000. “We sat on the top row and imagined ourselves ancient Romans,” White wrote. While Saint-Gaudens and McKim stayed seated where they were, White went down and rushed out into the arena, “struck an attitude and commenced declaiming” for their benefit. Warming to the role, he began stabbing imaginary gladiators until a guard appeared and chased him off.

After Nîmes, they set off by diligence over the mountains to Le Puy, the highest town in France, at 4,000 feet, then on into Burgundy and the Loire Valley. By August 13, they were back in Paris. Gus felt they had learned even more by traveling third-class than from the architecture they had seen.

To commemorate the fellowship of the expedition, he made a mock-heroic Roman medallion six inches in diameter featuring in relief caricatures of each of the three. Mock-Latin tributes decorated the circumference. At the center was a large architect’s T-square at the base of which were inscribed the letters “KMA,” believed to have been an abbreviation for “Kiss My Ass.” Saint-Gaudens presented bronze reproductions to each of his two friends, and kept the third for himself.

Gus had “a most successful trip,” Gussie reported to her mother. “He feels he has learned a great deal from his architect friends.”

When Saint-Gaudens returned to work on the Farragut monument, White went with him to the studio to help with plans for the pedestal. For a while White stayed overnight at the apartment, until he found a place of his own. McKim lingered only a little while before returning to New York. Then White headed off again to see more of France, and returned bringing superb sketches he had done of landscapes, houses, street scenes, and cathedrals inside and out. Then it was back to work with Saint-Gaudens, their efforts marking the start of collaborations to come on some twenty projects.

Gussie appears to have welcomed White’s presence. “He is one of the nicest fellows I have ever met and Aug says he is tremendously talented,” she told her mother. White, however, was of another mind about her.

He loved being back in Paris, he wrote to his mother, “I hug S[ain]tGaudens like a bear every time I see him, and would his wife if she was pretty—but she ain’t—so I don’t.

She is very kind, however, and asks me to dinner, mends my clothes, and does all manner of things. She is an animated clothes rack, slightly deaf—a double barreled Yankee, and [I] mean to that extent that no comparison will suffice. Why fate should have ordained that such a man should be harnessed to such a woman, Heaven only knows. Nevertheless, she has been very kind to me, and I ought to be ashamed of myself for saying anything about her.

He thought Gussie’s sister Genie far prettier.

Gussie also showed uncommon patience about Gus heading off with White on social whirls. One night, with another gregarious American, William Bunce, they went to a masked ball at the Opera and, as she reported to her parents, did not come home until half-past six the next morning.

“I have just taken this paper from Gussie as she has a headache, and I don’t think she should write any more,” Gus scrawled in his own hand. “I close this epistle and fill the page so that Gussie can’t put anything else in it.”

“I am writing in the studio,” she began another letter. Aug was washing his hands in a pail of water and talking to a friend. White was tasting some bread for his lunch and she was seated at a table writing.

The model has just come in the second day and has retired behind a curtain to get himself up in Farragut’s coat and fixings and presently will mount on the stand where Aug will go to work. He and Mr. White are still working on the pedestal. … There is to be a high circular stone seat so fashioned.

Then she made a small diagram of the pedestal. “Please don’t say anything about this as yet, [as] it is by no means fully decided upon.”

“Do you want to know how I pass my day?” White wrote to his mother. He was awakened at his lodgings by a servant at nine-thirty, then chose to stay in bed for another half-hour, until he headed out for breakfast at 3 rue Herschel—“and ring the doorbell five times, which is my private ring.”

Coffee, eggs, and oatmeal being swallowed, we forthwith make our way to the studio, and both set to work at our respective businesses. Then comes lunch hour. This is a very simple matter for Saint-Gaudens, who partakes of an unappetizing lunch packed up by his femme. With me it is quite an event. I go and buy all my provisions and lunch like a Seigneur [a lord] on 20 cents. Something in this way: Pâté de foie gras; boned chicken, or sardines, 4 cts.; two petits pains, well toasted, 2 cts.; rhum pudding, 3 cts.; un petit fromage suisse, 5 cts. and about 5 cts. worth of wine. …

Then we go to work again, and darkness—which comes here now at five o’clock—gives us a rest.

Great as the demands of the work had become, Gus and Gussie were taking more time for some pleasure together, and with others. They dined out, attended an occasional social event, and went again to the opera.

Gus loved the opera no less than ever. But he loved the theater still more. The drama of the stage, the techniques of stagecraft—costume, lighting, scenery—all appealed tremendously. He loved watching actors at work and imagining himself in their place. If he could be anything other than what he was, he liked to say, he would be an actor. “I am convinced,” he later wrote, “that if I would overcome the sense of [self-] consciousness, I should be a wonderful actor.” And if not an actor, then a playwright, which might be better still, he thought. “How wonderful,” he would say, “to create characters to portray every phase of emotion, present all points of view, and with these characters work out their destinies.”

I think anything and everything. This seeing a subject so that I can take either side with sympathy and conviction I sometimes think is a weakness. Then again I’m thinking it’s a strength. I could put it to good use as a dramatist.

With her trouble hearing and her inadequate French, Gussie found the Paris theater extremely difficult to follow, and so seldom went with him. But she seems to have had a particularly good time at one evening affair put on by George and Louisa Healy. “We went to a dancing party at Mr. Healy’s and really enjoyed it very much,” she reported to her mother.

How often Gus and Healy saw each other, or what they may have talked about, is regrettably unrecorded. Certainly they had much in common. But whether they ever compared notes on their modest beginnings in Boston and New York, or their early student years in Paris, or the Civil War and its heroes, is impossible to know.

On her growing enjoyment of Paris, Gussie was explicit: “Every time I go out I like it better and better.”

In addition to the Healys, they were meeting other noted Americans, among them Phillips Brooks, the minister of Trinity Church in Boston, and Mark Twain, who had returned to Paris with his wife. Twain would be remembered at one after-dinner gathering at 3 rue Herschel consuming one black cigar after another until he finally asked, “What is Art?” which was the signal for all to go home. Gus never liked to “talk art” and hated art theory.

Art students like Carroll Beckwith and John Sargent were regularly in and out of the apartment and the studio. The studio the two young painters shared was on the same street as Gus’s, at 73 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. A few old friends from Gus’s own student days, like Alfred Garnier and Paul Bion, also made appearances.

Gus took great interest in students and was unusually generous with his encouragement of those he thought promising. But beyond that, as Will Low would write, he had a manner of expressing himself, “of making one ‘see things,’ ” that they long remembered.

He, in all simplicity, believed himself to be virtually inarticulate [Low wrote]; and for any personal exercise of the spoken or written word he quite honestly professed much the same aversion as he, the skilled artist, would feel for the bungling attempt of the ignorant amateur.

But it was precisely because he was so intensely an artist that his mental vision was clear, and that which he saw he in turn made visible—there is no other word—to others.

Sargent particularly impressed Saint-Gaudens. Further, he liked the young man. They exchanged work—Sargent gave Saint-Gaudens one of his watercolors; Saint-Gaudens fashioned a small medallion, a sketch in relief of Sargent in profile, which he gave to him. It was the start of a long stretch of mutual admiration.

Still, the struggle to “break away” with the Farragut and achieve something beyond the ordinary continued, and grew increasingly difficult as Saint-Gaudens became ever more demanding of himself. His Civil War memories from boyhood were strong within him—of watching from the cameo cutter’s window as the New England volunteers came marching down Broadway singing “John Brown’s Body,” of seeing Lincoln and Grant in person, and the wounded back from the battlefields. “I have such respect and admiration for the heroes of the Civil War,” he had written earlier, “that I consider it my duty to help in any way to commemorate them in a noble and dignified fashion worthy of their great service.”

New York was still, and always, home to Saint-Gaudens, and the Farragut, he knew, was to be New York’s first monument to the Civil War.

In late March he was suddenly stricken with violent intestinal pains and a high fever. “It was all Mr. White, Louis, and I could do to take care of him night and day,” Gussie wrote. Days passed before he felt strong enough to walk slowly beside her in the Luxembourg Gardens, and weeks went by before he was able to resume work. Feelings of depression—the “triste undertone” of his soul, as he called it—set in. Worst was the awful sense of time a-wasting. “You have no idea how hard it is for him to remain inactive when there is so much waiting for him to do,” Gussie told her father.

It was the largest piece Saint-Gaudens had yet attempted, and the wonder is someone who had begun as a cameo cutter and mastered that tiny, exacting craft to such perfection could now, not so long afterward, undertake a project of such colossal scale. But the lessons of cameo cutting, of working “in the small,” were not to be dismissed, even when working so large.

His inspiration had been the taller-than-life marble St. George by the Italian Renaissance sculptor Donatello, which he had seen in Florence and never forgotten. Donatello was his hero, second only to Michelangelo, and the effect of the St. George, of a man standing in repose yet clearly ready to take on the world, was just what he hoped to attain with his Farragut.

In how he faced a difficult task, Saint-Gaudens was at heart much akin to his subject. “Conceive an idea. Then stick to it. Those who hang on are the only ones who amount to anything,” he often said. In a tribute published following Farragut’s death in 1870, the Army and Navy Journal had written, “Once satisfied that a course must be pursued, it was utterly impossible to hold Farragut back from it.”

Saint-Gaudens’s Farragut had begun with a clay study of a nude figure two feet high. “Don’t leave any serious study to struggle with in the big,” was another of his working rules. It was in the small-scale model that the most serious attentions must be focused, “the whole ensemble together in the small,” he liked to say.

The procedure was then to enlarge the two-foot figure to life-size and again in clay, but supported now by an armature of iron braces. Once work on the life-size statue was complete, it would serve as the model for still another statue of more than eight feet in height, this again done in clay and with an even heavier armature.

The giant clay figure would require still more work before a plaster mold could be made, in sections, from which a giant plaster statue would then be cast, and it in turn would need considerable final going over before taken to the foundry to be cast in bronze.

At every stage it was a complex process involving many others besides the sculptor, and it took much time and close attention.

The subject of all these efforts, David Glasgow Farragut, was a man Saint-Gaudens had never known, never laid eyes on. He had only pictures to go by—photographs and engravings—plus descriptions provided by the admiral’s widow and son. As he would also admit privately, “I don’t fully understand about the sea.”

In real life the hero had stood about five feet six. To transpose the life-size clay model into its final heroic scale required that hundreds of measurements be made with calipers, and so a large scaffold had to be built beside the statue from which the workers could reach the uppermost portions of the figure.

But the mathematics of the system and even the most skilled use of calipers were never sufficient in and of themselves. The artist’s eye and the desire to breathe life into the clay had to be the deciding factors at almost every stage.

Saint-Gaudens would write of the “toughness” of the sculptor’s challenge, all the problems to be dealt with, the different helpers, the equipment and rubbish, and “all the while trying to soar into the blue.”

He excused the delays that came with the work on the ground that a sculptor’s efforts endured so long that it was nearly a crime to fail to do everything possible to achieve a worthy result. He had a terrible dread of making a bad sculpture. “A poor picture goes into the garret,” he would write, “books are forgotten, but the bronze remains, to amuse or shame the populace and perpetuate one of our various idiocies.”

The finished work had to convey the reality and importance of a singular personality. It had to be more than “a good likeness.” It had to express the character of the man.

“Farragut’s legs seem to be pretty troublesome,” Gussie reported. Farragut must stand braced on proper sea legs, Gus insisted. But how to achieve that?

A friend from New York, the editor of Scribner’s Monthly, Richard Watson Gilder, who was visiting Paris and was short like Farragut, agreed to pose for the legs. Still Gus fretted. “He has been very much bothered by one of Farragut’s legs, and has been working on it for weeks. He is not satisfied yet,” Gussie wrote later, just before he took ill.

The admiral’s buttons and braid, his cap, sword, all had to be true to fact and a natural part of him, like his stance. Greater still was the importance of the face, and the face, the head, unlike a portrait on canvas, had to look right from every angle. The whole work must look right from every angle.

Even with Saint-Gaudens back on the job following his illness, the work fell steadily further behind schedule. Expenses kept mounting, and to her parents, who were still faithfully providing financial help, Gussie felt obliged to explain what the work now involved and why even more help was needed. “Am sorry to bother you so much but we must have some money or else collapse,” she wrote bluntly at one point. Just the wheels of the dolly on which the clay model turned cost $40, she emphasized.

Her unshaken belief in her husband was plain. She wanted those at home to know how hard he was working and how much he had to put up with on the job. Almost no one seemed to understand how much he needed time to work and to think without interruptions. “He is very much bothered by visitors [to the studio] at all hours. He can’t turn them out. He isn’t made so. …”

“Gus is working on Farragut’s left leg today,” she wrote on May 8, 1879. A week later she could report, “Augustus … seems to be conquering the legs which have been his bête noire.” On May 30 she could at last announce, “Farragut has two legs to stand on,” but had to say also that Farragut still “bothers Gus a great deal. He finds it hard work to satisfy himself.”

By June he had moved on to the flap on the admiral’s coat, intending that it appear to be blowing in the wind. To Gussie it was a marvel how he made the silk lining and the cloth of the coat look as if made of silk and cloth.

She felt increasingly happy—with what he was creating and with their life together. One Sunday they spent an entire afternoon in the Bois de Boulogne, just the two of them, picking wildflowers and sitting talking under the trees. She had never loved Paris more. “It is strange how fascinating the life here becomes after living a couple of years. There is always so much to see and do.” She painted a portrait of a friend, the wife of an expatriate American doctor named Farlow. The doctor was so pleased with the result he asked her to do him as well.

Work on the pedestal with Stanford White continued, but when, with the return of summer, White chose to go off to Italy, Gus decided to go, too. His doctors told him he needed rest and a change of scene. Gussie traveled with her sister Genie to Château d’Oex in Switzerland, to wait for Gus to join them there. He arrived on August 6, bringing her a beautiful lamp to hang in their parlor in Paris, and together with White they stayed on in Switzerland for another few days.

The time away had done Gus great good. “[He] feels like a lion,” she said. Decisions on the pedestal had been resolved, and White returned to New York. All was fine, it seemed.

But something had gone wrong between Gus and White. What happened is not altogether clear. The nearest thing to an explanation was provided later by sister Genie. Gus’s “friendship, or perhaps I should say affection, was limited,” Genie wrote, due to certain sides to White’s personality and way of life.

In early days, mingled with White’s enthusiasm, extraordinary activity and capacity for work, kindly instinct and friendliness, which made him personally attractive, were his aggressive, violent prejudice and a certain snobbishness that annoyed [Gus]. …

Gus cared nothing about food or clothes, no more now than in his student days in Paris. He would wear shirts until they were filled with holes, as Gussie lamented, and, according to Genie, he came to view with contempt White’s adoration of food. Food was the way White “showed his self-indulgence in those days,” Genie said, and recalled how, when crossing a mountain pass in Switzerland, White insisted on delaying everything for several hours in order that he could taste some famous dish at a local inn, which infuriated Gus.

Undoubtedly there was more to it than that, and whatever the issue, it appears to have begun in Italy. In a letter to White later, Gus said he was “feeling sorry for things [he had done] in Italy,” but in response White urged no more apologizing: “If ever a man acted well [in Italy], you did, and I ought to have been kicked for many reasons.”

Whatever the cause of the disagreement, the friendship was not broken; it only cooled somewhat. Their work together continued.

Much of great importance had still to be resolved, not the least of which were the final height and location of the monument.

Correspondence between Gus and White continued. There were questions about the kind of stone to be used for the pedestal and the design of two relief angels representing Courage and Loyalty that Gus was to do. Union Square, at Broadway and 14th Street, remained the favorite choice for the location among members of the Farragut Commission, and Saint-Gaudens was inclined to agree, though he had some concern about the height of the statue of Lafayette by Bartholdi in the square.

In New York, White went to look over the site and reported that the Lafayette stood not more than eight feet, four inches. “If you stick to eight feet, six inches, I do not think you will go much wrong,” he told Saint-Gaudens.

White thought Madison Square Park, farther uptown between 23rd and 26th streets, on Fifth Avenue, and in particular at the corner of 26th and Fifth, was a far preferable spot—“a quiet and distinguished place … where the aristocratic part of the avenue begins … and the stream of people walking down Fifth Avenue would see it at once.” He also reminded Gus that Delmonico’s, the most fashionable dining place in town, was directly across the street, and Gus understood what that alone meant to White.

“Go for Madison Square,” Gus responded.

He and White both knew how important the monument could be to New York, as well as their own careers. He was calling on everything in his power, Gus wrote to former minister to France John Dix, a member of the commission, “to break away from the regular conventional statues.”

October 14, 1879: … Aug is just as busy and bothered as he can be. He has three men at work in the studio besides Louis, and the molder much of the time and so much going on distracts him very much. They are getting ready to enlarge the statue and yesterday they made some mistakes and it took the whole lot of them all today to undo and [re]do what they did yesterday. A sculptor friend of Aug told him he would be made nearly wild with it and that for a long time apparently nothing would seem to be accomplished. I tell you all this to give you an idea of what is going on. Aug is going to enlarge the head in wax and will do it here [in the apartment] in the evenings. He is fussing over the Farragut and working on angles [for the pedestal] now. I wish I could help him but there seems to be nothing I can do but keep the house going and his clothes in order. Louis works as hard as he can and is never satisfied unless he is doing something. As daylight is so precious we are going to try going to bed at nine and getting up at half past six or thereabouts. I don’t know how it will work, but we will try anyway. …

November 14: The Farragut statue looks much finer to us in the big than it did in the life-size one. If necessary it could be cast now, but Aug will probably work over it off and on for two months before having it cast.

The “fussing” went on, and on. He seemed never quite satisfied with what he had done. He hated to let his work go.

Gussie had been assigned to making the braid on the sleeve of “our Farragut.” It was a “purely mechanical thing … but it takes ever so much time. …”

But life was not all work. Gus had acquired a flute and she a piano on which to accompany him. Rental for both, she assured her parents, was only three dollars a month.

Sometimes he would scratch in a few good-spirited lines of his own at the end of her letters, or add a cartoon or caricature of himself, his head with the beard drawn the shape of a wedge, his long nose a straight line down from the forehead, his eyes two tiny dots.

Through the whole slow, drawn-out process, the great volume of clay had to be kept constantly moist on the surface. If it were allowed to dry out, the statue would crack. In December came the coldest winter since the year of the siege, with snows in Paris over a foot deep. The Seine froze over, and the worry inside the studio was that the wet clay might freeze and the statue crack. Two large coal stoves had to be kept burning, the temperature in the room and the surface of the clay carefully monitored day and night. “Poor Aug is driven, he does not know which way to turn and the days are so short and dark he can seem to accomplish very little in them,” wrote Gussie. “Louis sleeps there, and keeps the fires up all the time,” she reported a week later.

Writing to Richard Gilder on December 29, 1879, Gus said, “All my brain can conceive now is arms with braid, legs, coats, eagles, caps, legs, arms, hands, caps, eagles, eagles, caps, and so on; nothing, nothing but that statue.”

In a letter to La Farge written the same day, he confided, “I haven’t the faintest idea of the merit of what I’ve produced. At times I think it good, then indifferent, then bad.”

By the last week of January 1880, the work in clay was nearly done to the satisfaction of the sculptor—all but for one troublesome leg. “One of Farragut’s legs has always bothered him and I am afraid he has used a great many swear words about it,” Gussie said, “but yesterday for the first time he got the leg and trousers to suit him and when I went up to the studio he was singing, so I knew that he was very happy about something. …”

The admiral stood eight feet, three inches tall, his legs apart, the left leg (the one giving the most trouble) slightly back from the right, the toes of the great fourteen-inch-long shoes pointed nearly straight ahead. The sword hanging from his left side and the fieldglasses grasped in the large left hand were also of heroic proportions.

He stood as if on deck at sea braced for whatever was to come, chin up, eyes straight ahead. The flap of his long double-breasted coat seemed truly to blow open with the wind, and the back of the coat, too, billowed out. And while due attention was paid to the braid on the sleeves, the buttons, belt, and straps that held the sword, there was an overall, prevailing simplicity that conveyed great inner strength, no less than the presence of an actual mortal being, for all the figure’s immense size. The admiral had missed buttoning the third button on his coat, for example.

The intent, weather-beaten face said the most. The look on the face, like the latent power in the stance, leaving no doubt that this was a man in command.

Casting the statue in plaster was scheduled to begin on Monday, February 9. “There are nineteen great bags of plaster here,” Gussie reported from the studio, “and any quantity of bars of iron and they will all go into the statue. They will be four days making the mold and then … the plaster statue will be cast.”

Once that cast was finished, Gus went to work again, and when done, “thought better of it,” as he reported to Stanford White.

A few writers for newspapers were permitted to come in and take a look, with the understanding that nothing was to be said in print until the statue was finished.

“I have seen nothing finer of its kind, even in France,” the correspondent for the New York World wrote at once. “The statue is admirably naturalistic in the best sense. It does not seem like a man of clay, but like a man of flesh and blood.” It was a first rave review, but Gus was furious that anything at all had been published at this stage.

Only days later, with all ready for the next step, there was an accident. In the process of getting the statue free from the scaffolding, it slipped and landed hard, cracking one of the troublesome legs. Twenty men had been helping with ropes and rollers. No one seemed at fault. “It was immensely heavy,” Gussie explained in a letter. Saint-Gaudens and others at once went to work, and the damage was repaired. To the delight of everyone, the weather was suddenly like summer, Gussie wrote. “Clear and cloudless and everything growing green. … Every window … open wide all day long. … There is nothing like Paris in spring.” Aug was “very well and very happy over his statue. …”

In April, Gussie discovered she was pregnant and wrote to tell her mother that her sickness each morning passed quickly and that immediately afterward her appetite returned better than ever.

Gus decided to submit a plaster Farragut, along with five of his basreliefs, to the Paris Salon. For a brief time, before being placed on exhibition inside, the statue stood out in the open air, as Gus had never seen it until then. “He felt very much pleased,” Gussie wrote, “and says he knows now that he has done a good thing. …”

His entries were awarded an Honorable Mention, and the Farragut received especially strong praise from French critics. Saint-Gaudens had captured “that initiative and boldness which Americans possess and which Farragut exemplified,” wrote Émile Michel in Revue des Deux Mondes. The statue, said Paul Leroi in L’Art, was “the incarnation of the sailor, better cannot be done.”

By the middle of May the plaster statue was ready to be moved to the long-established Gruet Foundry, there to be cast in bronze. It was not only essential that such a foundry be experienced, Saint-Gaudens insisted, but that he be on hand to supervise the entire process. The cost was substantial, $1,200, as Gussie wrote to her parents. She was going with him to the foundry to watch. “You know it is quite an exciting thing. …”

Taking part in the whole process day after day at the foundry, Saint-Gaudens became a nervous wreck. Two weeks later, when the lower half of the statue was cast, again something went wrong and it had to be done all over, and again at considerable expense.

When at last the whole cast was done, the statue complete in bronze, its entire outer surface had to be expertly finished, and, as Saint-Gaudens wanted, with the admiral’s buttons and insignia given a slightly brighter gloss.

Finally the completed work—eight feet, three inches in length and weighing nine hundred pounds—had to be carefully packed up, shipped by rail to Le Havre and sent on its way aboard ship to New York. It was the largest work of sculpture in bronze by an American ever shipped from France until then.

Not until midsummer was everything sufficiently in order for Gus and Gussie themselves to leave for home.

III

The baby, a boy, was born in Roxbury on September 29, and christened Homer after his maternal grandfather. Through the months that followed, while Gussie and the infant remained with her family, Saint-Gaudens was busy finding a studio in New York and concentrating on work on the Farragut pedestal.

As finally resolved with White, and after much wrangling with the commission over the costs involved, the pedestal would place the statue fully nine feet above ground level and include tall, slightly curved stone façades reaching out to either side, these to provide a comfortable place to sit—an exedra, as it was known—as well as space for the two large allegorical figures in relief representing Loyalty and Courage, combined with a motif of fish and waves at sea. This entire composition was being done in Hudson River blue stone, with the thought that its color would add further to the nautical theme. A lettered tribute to the admiral was also to be included, this composed by White’s father.

The relief figures of Loyalty and Courage were a major work unto themselves, and here again Louis Saint-Gaudens took part. They were to be seated figures and as large in scale as Farragut, their arms reaching out three feet. They were beautiful and unadorned, with the look of twin sisters, though the expression on the face of Courage was a touch more resolute and she wore breast armor, while Loyalty was partly bare-breasted. It was to be a pedestal unlike any ever seen in New York or anywhere else in the United States.

“Yesterday I had a good long day’s work, also today—I expect that in about two weeks to have both Loyalty and Courage finished,” Saint-Gaudens wrote in high spirits to Gussie, “Darling ole smuche,” in an undated letter from New York. “They have commenced cutting the fishes and they look very fine. The piece of blue stone that goes directly under the Farragut is the largest piece of blue stone ever quarried.”

“Did I ever tell you what a lot of handsome females there are here,” he kidded her, “a great many more than in France and all of them have a rare thing, fine breasts.” Who posed for Loyalty and Courage is not known.

How was the “Babby,” he asked at the end. “Is he President yet?”

The grand unveiling took place at Madison Square on the afternoon of May 25, 1881.

A Marine band played; sailors marched. The celebrated New York attorney and orator Joseph H. Choate delivered an extended tribute to the admiral, and 10,000 people stood in the hot sun through the length of it.

Seated on the speakers’ platform, along with some forty-five “notables”—including Mrs. Farragut, the mayor, the governor, church pastors, admirals, generals, and commissioners—could be seen the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his wife. It was his first experience with public acclaim, and happening in his own hometown.

The monument was a stunning success. The critics were exuberant, the whole art world electrified. The New York Times hailed the Farragut with the headlines: A BEAUTIFUL AND REMARKABLE WORK OF ART, and MR. SAINT-GAUDENS’S TRIUMPH.

It is Farragut just as he looked, quiet, unpretending, stern, resolved to do his duty. The heroic is not obtruded. … For the great point of this statue is the absence of “fuss and feathers” in the attitude as well as the dress. It would be commonplace, if it were not so simple and true.

The two bas-relief figures of Loyalty and Courage ought to be ranked among the finest achievements of sculpture in America, the Times continued. “The faces are naturally … and most carefully worked. Here a weak man would fail.”

The character of the indomitable admiral “shines from the sculptured face,” said the critic for the New York Evening Post. The sculptor’s work impressed one not as a statue but as a living man. “The spectator does not feel the bronze, he does not feel the sculptor; he feels the presence of the Admiral himself.”

“In modeling severe, broad yet minute in finish … full of dignity and reserved force,” wrote Richard Gilder in Scribner’s, making no mention of the legs he had posed for. Saint-Gaudens’s Farragut, he continued, might be called the work of a “new Donatello,” which must have pleased Saint-Gaudens as much as anything said in print.

Praise came from all sides. Most touching for Saint-Gaudens were the reactions of his fellow artists and friends. The statue took his breath away, wrote Maitland Armstrong, who had also returned from Paris. “The sight of such a thing renews one’s youth, and makes one think that life is worth living after all.”

A few days after the unveiling, at about midnight, Saint-Gaudens and Gussie and a friend were walking up Fifth Avenue, on their way home from a party. As they approached Madison Square, they saw an elderly man standing alone in the moonlight looking at the statue. Recognizing his father, Saint-Gaudens went to him and asked what he was doing there at such an hour.

“Oh, you go about your business!” his father answered. “Haven’t I got a right to be here?”

It had been fourteen years since Augustus Saint-Gaudens had sailed for Paris in steerage at the age of nineteen with little more than high ambition and the $100 in boyhood earnings his father had put aside for him.

Now he had a wife and a son of his own. The last three years in Paris had been for him and Gussie as difficult, productive, and as happy as any they had known. With his brilliant debut as an artist he had indeed “soared into the blue” and achieved recognition such as he had dreamed of. There seemed little likelihood he would ever again have to struggle to find work, or depend on the support of others. He and Stanford White were already started on another project.

Further, he had established himself as an artist brilliantly capable of doing justice to the memory of the Civil War. In time he would sculpt six of the most remarkable public monuments to the war ever created. And another of these, like the Farragut, would be made in Paris.