Sculptor. He was born in Dublin, son of a French father and an Irish mother. He was taken as a child to New York, and, at the age of 13 apprenticed to a cameo cutter. Between 1868 and 1870 he trained as a sculptor in Paris, studying at the École des Beaux-Arts under François Jouffroy. He then set up a studio in Rome, where he began work on his first full-length figure, Hiawatha (1872–74). He returned to New York in 1872 and was soon receiving portrait commissions from prominent New Yorkers and producing decorative sculpture for such architects as Henry Hobson Richardson and Stanford White, in collaborations which also included the painter and stained-glass designer, John La Farge. His Memorial to Admiral Farragut (1877–80, Madison Square Park, New York) established his reputation as a sculptor of public monuments. He went on to combine gritty naturalism with allegory in the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial (1884–97, Boston Common) and the Sherman Memorial (1892–1903, Grand Army Plaza, New York). A substantial part of his output consists of delicate portrait reliefs of wealthy and artistic contemporaries, but, on a larger scale, Saint- Gaudens also produced the imaginary historical portrait of Deacon Samuel Chapin, known as The Puritan (1883–86, Springfield, Massachusetts), and a colossal weathervane in the form of the goddess Diana (1893–-1940) for Madison Square Gardens, New York (now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art). In 1914, as part of the celebrations of the centenary of the Treaty of Ghent, which established the peace terms ending the Anglo-American War of 1812, the American Peace Centenary Committee presented Great Britain with a replica of Saint-Gaudens’ statue of Abraham Lincoln (erected in Chicago in 1887); the replica cast was unveiled in Parliament Square, London, on 28 July 1920.
Bibliography: C. Lewis Hind, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, New York, 1908; H. Saint-Gaudens (ed.), The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, New York, 1913; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 203–06, 300, 364, 365.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, Terry Cavanagh, January 2025
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, photo by De Witt Ward, 1 January 1905 (Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
