After Augustus Saint-Gaudens: his memorial exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.(sculptor)

This year marks the centenary of the death of the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. His passing on August 3, 1907, at age fifty-nine, after a seven-year struggle with cancer, drew international notice. Lengthy obituaries in newspapers and journals universally labeled him the greatest sculptor in the history of American art and frequently invoked the word genius. Hundreds of condolence letters were sent to his widow, Augusta, and their son Homer (1880-1958), saluting the French-Irish immigrant who became the most accomplished American sculptor of the Beaux-Arts era. (1) A simple funeral--attended by family, close friends, and studio assistants--was held on August 7 in Cornish, New Hampshire, where since 1885 Saint-Gaudens had spent summers, and after 1900 lived year-round. (2)

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Although Saint-Gaudens's illness prevented him from sculpting very much in his final years, he continued to accept selected commissions, making small sketches and directing his studio assistants on enlarging and refining clay models. At the time of his death, assistants at the Cornish studio--Frances Grimes (1869-1963), Henry Hering (1874-1949), and Elsie Ward (1871-1923)--continued to work on well-advanced commissions, among them the Phillips Brooks Monument, 1896-1907 (Copley Square, Boston), a bronze statue of the longtime rector of Trinity Church attended by the figure of Christ set within a canopied architectural setting designed by Stanford White. (3) With large-scale projects such as these to complete and deliver to impatient committees, as well as Augusta Saint-Gaudens's well-orchestrated campaign to cast posthumous reductions after her husband's sculptures for steady income, authorized estate production of the sculptor's work continued through the early 1920s.

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