Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Sculpture
American artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens finds inspiration in France to create one of America’s most iconic sculptures, a memorial to the Civil War hero Admiral David Farragut.
AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS came to Paris for the first time in 1867, the year it seemed that the whole world came to Paris for the Exposition Universelle, the grand, gilded apogee of Second Empire exuberance. He arrived on an evening in February, by train after dark and apparently alone.
He ignored the conventions of his day and became one of the greatest American sculptors of this century.
I find myself sketching a top hat on a snapshot I’ve taken of a former pasha’s obituary photograph.
Superb carvings by an obscure artisan recapture the circus world of the 1920s
The curiously troubled origin of a brief and fitting inscription
On February 9, 1911, Congress approved a bill authorizing construction of a monument to Abraham Lincoln in the nation’s capital. The notion of building such a memorial had long moved many people for varied reasons.
His works ranged from intimate cameos to heroic public monuments. America has produced no greater sculptor.
For the “mysterious aura” of his art, a critic has compared him to Thomas Eakins. In the “haunting grandeur” of his sculpture, he is the equal of Auguste Rodin.
After standing in New York Harbor for nearly one hundred years, this thin-skinned but sturdy lady needs a lot of attention. She’s getting it -- from a crack team of French and American architects and engineers.
AT A TABLE IN a cozy Chinese restaurant on the Left Bank of Paris, half a dozen men argue loudly about the Statue of Liberty.
A photographic record of the boom years in the granite quarries of Barre, Vermont
Barre, cried one Vermont newspaper in 1893, was “The Busy Hustling Chicago of New England,” and the town itself cheerfully claimed to be the “Granite Center of the World.” Not of the world, perhaps, but certainly of the United States: in the years following t
A ponderous memorial to a people who refused to vanish
It is normally the winners, not the losers, who erect triumphal irches at a war’s end.
Vinnie Ream sculptured Lincoln while she was still a teen-ager
President Lincoln had been dead more than three years in May of 1868, and the model of his statue still rested unfinished in young Vinnie Ream’s Capitol studio.
In September a statue of Nathan Hale, martyr-patriot of the Revolution, is to be unveiled near the main entrance to the CIA headquarters in Washington.
James Fenimore Cooper told him; Charles Sumner and Ralph Waldo Emerson told him; even Charles Bulfinch, one of the architects of the Capitol, told him; but Horatio Greenough knew his own mind.
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