Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Admiral David Glasgow Farragut (1879–80), courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The great drama of American culture has been its ongoing dialogue with Europe. Lacking a native fine-art tradition, early American artists were keenly aware that one measure of the new country’s legitimacy would be to match the creative accomplishments of civilizations past. They and their successors looked to the forms and idioms of Europe as an armature upon which to erect their own modes of expression. At the same time, they were determined to match artistic with political independence with the creation of a uniquely, distinctively American art. There is, surely, no more prototypical actor upon this stage than the Gilded Age sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, currently the subject of a rich and spellbinding show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[1]

Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a French father. The family emigrated to the United States when he was six months old, settling in Manhattan, where he got his start as a sculptor working for two cameo cutters—portraitists who carved miniature, low-relief likenesses in bone or shell. His primary apprenticeship, however, was in Europe. In 1867, he arrived in Paris, where he took academic instruction and was profoundly influenced by the work of artists such as François Rude (1784–1855), Emanuel Frémiet (1824–1910), Paul Dubois (1829–1905), Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827–1875), and Jean-Alexandre-Joseph Falguière