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For more on the the Saint Gaudens National Historical Park, see the first post in this series. In this post: Saint Gaudens’s home, Aspet (named after the birthplace of his father), the Temple, and one more portrait relief. This post concludes the series. This post is available as a video at https://youtu.be/Xw_nHLUL5UI.

Aspet

What became Saint Gaudens’s home was built ca. 1800 as an inn. He first rented it in summer 1885 from Charles Beaman. (Saint Gaudens’s portraits of the Beaman family appear in this post.) Saint Gaudens purchased the property in 1892, adding to the house a large porch, dormers, stepped gables, and a garden.

From 1900 until his death in 1907, the Saint Gaudens lived at Aspet full time, with his family. His widow Augusta summered here until her death in 1926. It was Augusta and son Homer who established the Saint Gaudens Memorial in 1919, leaving much of the family’s property to the site.

Downstairs are two parlors, a dining room, and the kitchen, all of which have original furnishings. Like the floorboards in the stables, the floorboards and rugs look so old that I can imagine Saint Gaudens walking on them.

On the walls of the dining room are a replica of John Singer Sargent’s portrait of young Homer Saint Gaudens (more on that here), plus a replica of the late-5th-c. BC Greek relief of a Nike (Victory) fixing her sandal. On the windowsill at the far right is the bowl given to Saint Gaudens by the members of the Cornish Colony in 1905. (See under Temple, below.)

The upper floors (not open to visitors) have four bedrooms and two baths, plus servants’ quarters. Augusta used to work at her desk on the landing and keep an eye out for visitors through the fanlight above the front door.

Gardens by the Little Studio and Aspet

Between Aspet and the Little Studio are several elegant gardens, beautifully blooming in August. Benches encourage visitors to relax and enjoy the view. Oh, how I wish I could create a garden like this!

Temple

At the far end of the meadow is the Temple, which holds the ashes of Saint Gaudens and several members of his family. The small structure is a recreation in marble of a stage set for a 1905 play, “A Masque of ‘Ours’; The Gods and the Golden Bowl”. Written and performed by some 90 members of the Cornish Colony, the play honored the twentieth anniversary of Saint Gaudens’s arrival in Cornish. The golden bowl presented to Saint Gaudens by the performers (or a reproduction of it?) sits in the dining room at Aspet. More here.

Saint Gaudens thanked his friends by designing a plaque to commemorate the event, which included the names of all the participants. The SGNHP has one of the plaques in the Little Studio (third from left, above).

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887 or later

In 1887, Saint Gaudens did sketches for a relief portrait of Stevenson (1850-1894), whose work he admired. Even then the famed Scottish writer was quite ill and skeletally thin … but Saint Gaudens chose to show him relaxing against pillows, reading. A circular version of this portrait hangs in the Little Studio.

The inscription on this very large plaster version is a quote from Stevenson, but it seems to fit Saint Gaudens’s own sense of life, which makes it a perfect ending to our visit to the Saint Gaudens National Historical Park.

Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavours. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another.

Robert Louis Stevenson

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.
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