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Augustus Saint-Gaudens

1848 - 1907

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 thirteen apprenticed to a cameo cutter. Between 1868 and 1870 he trained as a sculptor in Paris, studying at the Ecole 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 John La Farge and Stanford White. 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, Mass.), and a colossal weathervane in the form of the goddess Diana (1893-940) for Madison Square Gardens, New York (now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art).

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