Bronze Mirrors

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Henry Adams remarked, "was a child of Benvenuto Cellini, smothered in an American cradle." Saint-Gaudens certainly lacked Cellini's proud fire; in his prime he was a jovial, auburn-bearded member of 15 clubs--a frock-coated good fellow of the sort that two world wars have made as nearly extinct as the buffalo--who roared out popular ballads while he worked, and finished the day with dinner at Delmonico's. And unlike the supremely articulate Florentine, Saint-Gaudens simply could not talk about art; he was afraid, he explained, that he would say "some damphool thing."

But last week, on the 100th anniversary of the sculptor's birth, it was easy to see that, Henry Adams to the contrary, Saint-Gaudens had not been smothered. Manhattan's Century Association, a gathering place for arts and artists that have begun to gather dust, put on a private showing which highlighted the delicacy of his bas-reliefs and reached a rare pitch of portraiture in the stubble-bearded head of General Sherman--as melancholy and implacable as the head of a fighting cock.

Saint-Gaudens' major works are landmarks spread out over the outdoors for all to see. The equestrian Sherman on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, the Chicago Lincoln, Boston's Shaw Memorial, and the memorial figure of grief in Washington's Rock Creek Cemetery, beneath which Henry Adams now lies buried with his wife, all show Saint-Gaudens' size. Critics are apt to regard his art, like Rodin's, as more pictorial than sculptural--it looks modeled rather than molded, and seems to hold some of the softness of clay. But it is art which exerts a grip on millions of imaginations.

Saint-Gaudens had gone to work at twelve as an apprentice cameo-cutter, and early acquired the habit of taking infinite pains with details. He spent 14 years on the Shaw Memorial (see cut) and he modeled 40 Negro heads for it before deciding on the 16 he finally used. Such painstaking appealed to Henry Adams' New England genius, and Saint-Gaudens' talent for mirroring vast ideas in bronze made him just the man, Adams thought, to create a memorial for Mrs. Adams' tomb.

Describing that memorial, Adams supplied (in his Education of Henry Adams) a thoughtful epitaph for Saint-Gaudens himself. "Numbers of people came," he wrote, "for the figure seemed to have become a tourist fashion, and all wanted to know its meaning. Most took it for a portrait statue, and the remnant were vacant-minded in the absence of a personal guide. None felt what would have been a nursery instinct to a Hindu baby or a Japanese jinricksha-runner. . . . Like all great artists, Saint-Gaudens held up the mirror and no more."

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