We don’t know nearly as much about nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American sculpture as we should. To understand why, it’s necessary to go back to two events in 1907: the August death of Augustus Saint-Gaudens in Cornish, New Hampshire, and Pablo Picasso’s completion of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in Paris several weeks earlier. During his lifetime, Saint-Gaudens had attained the heights of renown, yet soon after his death his reputation and those of sculptors like him quickly fell into eclipse, swept aside by the revolution unleashed by Picasso and his modernist confrères.

This situation remained unchanged until 1976, when to celebrate the nation’s bicentennial the Whitney Museum of American Art organized “200 Years of American Sculpture,” a broad historical survey. Most sculptors were represented by a single object, or in some cases two. Saint-Gaudens had eighteen. That same year the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a Daniel Chester French retrospective that subsequently toured nationally. Both of these displays essentially reintroduced the two artists to a public that knew them only, if at all, through their most famous public monuments—things like Saint-Gaudens’s Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston and French’s Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

There followed increasing levels of attention: a Saint-Gaudens retrospective at the Met in the mid-1980s and, around the same time, the first biography of the artist—though, tellingly, this was written not by an art historian or critic but by a retired Washington civil servant. Yet there remain large lacunae. There is still no published