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Augustus Saint Gaudens (1848-1907) was one of America’s best sculptors. In 1885, when his career was taking off, he and his family began to spend time in Cornish, New Hampshire, to escape the summer heat of New York City. Many artists followed him there, including painters (Maxfield Parrish, Kenyon Cox, and others), novelists, architects, and sculptors (Paul Manship, Herbert Adams, and others): the group was known as the Cornish Colony. Saint Gaudens’s widow, who lived until 1926, bequeathed the family’s New Hampshire property for use as a museum. The Saint Gaudens National Historical Park (run by the National Park Service) is in Cornish, NH, not far off I-91.

The SGNHP’s collection includes exact casts or meticulous copies of many of Saint Gaudens’s most important works, as well as some originals. In the next few posts, I’ll show items roughly in the order in which I saw them when I visited SGNHP. For a short biography of Saint Gaudens and a chronological survey of his works, see my Artist-Entrepreneurs: Saint Gaudens, MacMonnies, and Parrish.

Standing Lincoln, 1887

By the 1880s, tens of thousands of Americans still remembered how President Abraham Lincoln looked, and dozens of sculptures had been created to memorialize him: see Artist-Entrepreneurs, pp. 21-25. But it was Saint Gaudens’s interpretation of Lincoln that set the standard for Lincoln portraits: a gaunt figure with head bowed, deep in thought. He stands in front of a very presidential chair, with an eagle spreading its wings across the back.

The Standing Lincoln was the first sculpture Saint Gaudens modeled after he began summering in Cornish. This copy is near the Visitor Center.

The SGNHP’s copy is a very impressive work, but the original version in Chicago has a setting that makes it stunning. It’s set off from the park that surrounds it by a wide platform and a set of steps. At either end of the platform are spheres bearing excerpts from Lincoln’s most famous speeches.

Col. Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, 1897

Shaw (member of a Boston family prominent in the abolition movement) led the first regiment of black soldiers who fought in the Civil War. He died with many of his men in an attack on Fort Wagner in Charleston, SC. (The movie Glory is based on Shaw’s life.)

This SGNHP’s cast is the final version of Saint Gaudens’s design, with slight modifications from the original in Boston. It’s an indication of how proud Bostonians were of Shaw that his memorial was sited on the Common. But if you want to look at the Shaw Memorial without getting bumped by pedestrians … the SGNHP is a much better place than Boston.

The Shaw Memorial, with husband for scale.

Shaw himself.

Angel above Shaw and his men.

One of the remarkable things about the Shaw Memorial is that it has more than a dozen soldiers, all dressed in uniform … yet none the details are repeated- not the faces, not the angles of the rifles, not even the pantlegs and shoes of the marching men.

Adams Memorial, 1891

The Adams Memorial was created for Marian “Clover” Hooper Adams (1843-1885), wife of historian Henry Adams. Adams specified that the sculpture not be a portrait of his wife. He suggested a figure reminiscent of the Buddha, or of one of the painted images on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. Saint Gaudens spent three years working on the Adams Memorial, smashing at least three models in the process. The figure he finally designed has been interpreted as hope, serenity, atheism, or despair. Henry Adams called it “The Peace of God”. Saint Gaudens referred to it as “The Mystery of the Hereafter … beyond pain and beyond joy.” The setting in SGNHS, in a clearing in a grove of trees, is reminiscent of the original “outdoor room” designed by Stanford White for the original sculpture, which sits in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, DC.

More

• Admission to the Saint Gaudens National Historical Park is free if you have a senior pass from the National Parks Service, which can be purchased for a one-time fee.
• For more on Saint Gaudens, see this post from my history of outdoor sculpture in New York City. For more on the Shaw Memorial, see this post on the gilded plaster cast at the National Gallery in Washington, DC.
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