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Hello, I'm Beth Carroll. I'm here at the Saint Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, NH, home to one of America's greatest sculptors, Augustus Saint Gaudens. The Irish born sculptor, raised in New York City, first came to Cornish NH in 18-85 and Many other well known artists followed Saint Gaudens to Cornish forming what became known as the "Cornish Colony". His house and gardens are now preserved as Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site. Millions have seen his work in musuems and public places but, few know the man behind the art. A new documentary, produced by the Trustees of the Saint-Gaudens Memorial, hopes to change that. We're delighted to present this program to you now. I'll be back after the film, to talk with its producer & director, Paul Sanderson and to give you a tour of the site. Here now -- is "Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Master of American Sculpture." |
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Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Master of American Sculpture Final Script 4/19/08 Augustus Saint-Gaudens is known as a great artist. He's known as a great cultural leader. But in his art, he reached a pinnacle that had not been reached by others of his generation. He was able to have modernity and classicism in one piece. There is flesh and blood beneath the surface of the stone or beneath the surface of the bronze, and you can look into their eyes, look away and look back at them. And there are very few sculptors that can do that. There are in Saint-Gaudens' sculptures an object that sets up a relationship with the viewer and in a sense makes the transition from the human world to the artificial world. Its an extraordinary gift. I think of path-breaker, innovator, mentor, role model, teacher, genius. He brought American sculpture together and made it come of age. Narration: October 22, 1887 Lincoln Park Chicago. The city is feeling the affects of a cold autumn wind as a crowd estimated at almost 10,000 strong gather under overcast skies to witness the unveiling of a monument to their fallen hero, Abraham Lincoln. The crowd is strangely quiet and stays close to keep out the cold as a sense of anticipation fills the air. The great American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens sits nervously on the dais as he waits for his creation to be revealed to the world for the first time. After a few short speeches, the statue is unveiled and a 38 gun salute breaks the calm. As people move in and surround the giant figure of Lincoln who stands in front of a large chair, the moment is not lost on the sculptor. He feels a sense of relief. After three years of intense work, his childhood hero has been brought back to life for all the world to see. There will be many more, but this one is special. One critic wrote that "it must have been a labor of love on the part of the sculptor." Another said; "the statue proved that classic drapery is not indispensable to artistic affect to make the human form seem somewhat divine." On that rainy, dreary Saturday afternoon in Chicago, there's 10,000 people. There's booming. There's sound - all kinds of things. A crowd raises its roar because the man from Illinois has been resurrected. Saint-Gaudens is one of the key artists who gives us the modern image of Lincoln and he does it really with that work. There was this need to present to Americans an image of Lincoln that was both heroic and real. That's the nerve that Saint-Gaudens struck in these monuments. He's got the essence of Lincoln - the public Lincoln and the private Lincoln. What Saint-Gaudens creates is a first if you will memorial setting - a place in a park where you literally will come and come to visit and participate in. It is probably 100 feet from the road so you have to walk down a path. So you are beginning, if you will, a processional. You are entering a creative shrine, a public space. What I think is remarkable about the standing Lincoln is the whole environment that he did. You see Lincoln standing up from his chair getting ready to speak. Behind Lincoln you have this large exedra bench that invites the visitor, invites the viewer to sit behind Lincoln. Here Saint-Gaudens wants the engagement of the visitor not only to look at it and understand what you're seeing, but to participate in it, become part of the monument. No one was doing that in America. Narration: Though the face of Lincoln was based on a life mask, it was one that Saint-Gaudens knew well. As a young boy in New York he had seen it for the first time when the president-to-be gave a campaign speech at Cooper Union and once again when he lay in state after his death. Seeing the great leader lying before him had moved him so much that he came back again for a second look. It would stay with him throughout his life. Augustus was born in Dublin, Ireland to Bernard Saint-Gaudens, a French shoemaker and Mary McGuiness a local seamstress. The family sailed to America to escape the potato famine in 1848. They came in the steerage. They were not wealthy so they came third class. They settled in a poor immigrant area of the city in the southern part of Manhattan. Bernard set up a shoe shop and his wife was raising the boys. There were three of them. There was Augustus. There was Louie, and there was Andrew. I think Saint-Gaudens had a kind of a Horatio Alger beginning. He speaks in his reminiscences about wandering the streets, getting into trouble. Kind of a typical urban upbringing for a boy of his time and his class, and the shoe business eventually prospered. Augustus or Gus as his parents called him, said that he didn't care what he did as long as he could use his hands. He wanted to make something or create something. So the father used his connections in the French society and found a cameo cutter, a man named Louie Avet who needed an apprentice and Augustus was put to work there. It's interesting because that's where the family and Gus himself first realized that he had a talent with art because he made cameos that are still considered to be some of the most beautiful cameos ever made. And he made them completely untrained completely just off the cuff just as a young boy coming in and sitting down being told how to do it. He just did it. I think that some of those cameos are quite magnificent. They're very small. They're pieces of jewelry. They're made out of stone and shell. But they're really portraits in relief. They're extremely difficult to make. Some of his early cameos really come across like a trumpet of ambition. You know, 'look at me I am very technically skilled'. I think he challenged the masters that he worked for but we just know that he was all about ambition and really had a fire to become an artist. |
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Narration: From his window in Avet's small studio, Gus watched the civil war go by. He would later write, "From my window I saw virtually the entire contingent of New England volunteers on their way to the civil war - a spectacle profoundly impressive even to my youthful imagination." The draft riots would soon follow. Life in America would never be the same. At the same time, he had grander ambitions and began studying at the Cooper Union which was a very popular place to study because it was free for one and it was flexible so he could work during the day and study at night. He then entered the National Academy of Design which again was a very traditional academic route. But what he got there was exposure to major American artists of the day like John Quincy Adams Ward. Saint-Gaudens took all kinds of art lessons not knowing what he was going to do. But he took to sculpture. Ward was an established sculptor. And at that point his father had a surprise for him. He and his wife had gathered up enough funds to send him to Europe. And not only that but because of the father's French background, he could go to the French art school the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts. So Saint-Gaudens was sent to Paris in 1867 with a hundred dollars in his pocket. The turning point was when he went to Paris in 1867 and he had the support of his family in a sense to go back to roots that he had never explored. And when he got to Paris he had a real leg up on other Americans there because he spoke French. So he made friendships with French artists to a degree that most other Americans never could have dreamed of doing and that was to his advantage. He definitely struggled you know there are the stories of him sleeping on the floor in the studio of a friend. He carved cameos to supplement his income. And of course what was offered in Paris were the ateliers of many of France's greatest artists and architects, and this is this whole period in the mid 19th century when you have the rise, in effect, of professionalism - the professional art so to speak. What was notable at the time was that he chose to go to Paris and not to Rome or Florence where previous Americans had gone to study neoclassical sculptors. And that really was the crux of what changed the course of American sculpture. When he entered the Ecole, he entered a program that was based on competency in modeling and drawing the human form. So his classes were in drawing from life, drawing from the antique. Everything geared towards drawing the human form correctly. What we call the beaux-art style of sculpture is a naturalistic emphasis on the form. This was an acknowledgement that realism was ok lumps and warts and all. Narration: Unlike New York, Paris had major art museums like the Louvre where Gus discovered everything from the classical to contemporary French works of art. But it was at the Paris Exposition of 1867, the first French World's Fair, that he saw something that would change his life forever. He saw a sculpture by the renowned French artist Francois Jouffroy titled: "Girl Confiding Her Secret to Venus". Unlike anything he had seen in New York, this was a piece which combined a really intense realism with a kind of a natural grace. Kind of an emotional quality which he had not seen in any art in America. Jouffroy was an innovative artist. He was doing something that other French artists were not doing. He was a member of what was called the Neoflorentines. It was a group of artists seeing as their inspiration not classicism not Greece and Rome, but Renaissance Italy. And that was really important to Saint-Gaudens because by being shifted into that group right from the very beginning, it set the course for his career. Narration: In 1870 the French emperor Napoleon III was pushed into a disastrous war with Prussia. With the enemy forces occupying Paris, Gus caught one of the last trains to southern France and eventually landed in Rome. As he said he walked out into the city the first morning, saw the classical ruins, saw the sun glistening off the marble and he said it was like a door was opened to the world of the classical. When Gus was in Rome, he had his own studio. He was part of a community of artists with studios where those on the grand tour came to call to see the work and sometimes to commission work. The wealthy would come and call at an open studio afternoon and you would show them your work and you would have tea with them. And you would walk in the gardens with them and you courted the family and you courted the children so that everyone felt comfortable sitting for a portrait bust. And that was a tough set of learning experiences for Gus. He didn't come by that naturally. Narration: One of Saint-Gaudens' first clients was William Evarts, a distinguished lawyer and statesman who sat for a portrait bust. I think the Evarts is his strongest early portrait. It is uncompromising in the realism, just a beautifully carved marble and Evarts was one of his most important early supporters from agreeing to sit for the portrait to recommending Saint-Gaudens to his friends. Narration: Saint-Gaudens' first major commission would come from American businessman Montgomery Gibbs. It was a portrait of the great American Indian chief, Hiawatha. The Hiawatha was a work that Saint-Gaudens said would open people's eyes and it would astonish the world, and to me those remarks speak of an enormous ambition on his part. Saint-Gaudens chose to portray Hiawatha in a defeated pose. It's a very still piece. It's a very compact piece in a way. It's not all about the Beaux-arts surface bravura that he would have seen in Paris. It's a very traditional composition. It's American in subject matter but if you look at the piece its very Michelangeloesque in terms of form. And I think it was self referential about being an American. Choosing a subject matter that would call attention to what was a little bit different from a subject matter in Rome. He wanted to really set the world spinning and have the world know who he was. He had tremendous talent, dexterity - gifts that he wanted the world to know about. The life in Rome was not all work. There were parties. There were places to explore and they were rather stuffy parties but Saint-Gaudens was invited to them and he went. And at one of these Christmas parties his eye was caught by a young girl who was standing in a corner. She didn't seem to be mingling with the others and he went over to greet her and it was a young American named Augusta Homer. Narration: Gus would later write to a friend, "she was slim and quite tall and held herself beautifully. Her hair was piled high in a pompadour-like effect. The eyes were extraordinary - a blue that seemed sometimes to go almost black." She had been sent to Rome by her parents to learn art. She was a painter. He was a sculptor. They were both from America. They were both the same age and they hit it off. And sure enough at one point Saint-Gaudens contacted Thomas Homer the father and said I'd like your daughter's hand in marriage and Homer was caught. On the one hand his social pretensions said this boy is the son of immigrants. They don't have money. I don't know if this is the right match for my daughter. So he made one caveat: you get one job, one important job and you can have my daughter. Narration: And that important job would come in the form of a commission to create a monument honoring the Civil War hero Admiral David Farragut. The Civil War is really a catalyst that brings American sculpture into the common parlance that we know today. It brings it out into the real world so you begin to have monuments, works that are set up in squares in parks to be seen and to be viewed and to be experienced in the elements. It's in that arena that you then find Augustus Saint-Gaudens coming back to the United States and gets the commission for the Farragut. Admiral David Glasgow Farragut was one of the great heroes of the Civil War, and he was responsible for the subduing of the confederate fleet outside of New Orleans and the famous remark: "Damn the torpedoes! Full steam ahead!" |
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Narration: The commission for the Farragut monument would not come easily. At first the committee awarded the monument to John Quincy Adams Ward, Gus's former teacher. But Ward was overwhelmed with work and instead suggested they give it to Saint-Gaudens - an artist with great promise. It was the break the Gus had waited for. He said, "I have such respect and admiration for the heroes of the Civil War that I consider it my duty to help in anyway to commemorate them in noble and dignified fashion." And with that he married Augusta and plunged himself into his work. Because he recognized this piece was so important to his career, I think he decided early on it was going to be something special and different and new and unique. And in every way he approached it he was thinking outside the box. The Farragut Monument is not only Saint-Gaudens' first important commission, but it's also an important keynote in American art. It was to be in Madison Park which was in that time one of the central parts of Manhattan. The Farragut is really a pioneering work for two reasons. First it is the manner in which Saint-Gaudens has chosen to portray the figure of Farragut. You almost see the wind blowing. You feel the ocean spray and then he gently folds over the left corner of the coat as if its being wind blown. Secondly, he introduces two allegorical relief figures. So not only do you have the biography of the man, but you have these symbolic works of art. And that precedent of including allegory in a monument comes directly from France. When it was unveiled in May of 1881, the Farragut was a turning point in American sculpture. It was intended to celebrate a great American hero but also to teach Americans about the kind of values that should come across in a monument. These sea figures, the mythological figures seem to emerge out of the stone itself with real flesh. The lettering on that monument on that pedestal is some of the most beautiful I've ever seen in the sense that Saint-Gaudens understood how light would play across in sized or raised figures and during the course of the day, the inscription is on the one hand legible, it says something. On the other hand, there are passages that almost look like pure abstraction in their play of light and shadow of figure and ground. In this horizontal pedestal, he includes a bench. And what the bench is doing is inviting people to come and sit. And once you invite them to come and sit, you are in a sense drawing them into the memorial because they have to participate. The critics raved about the piece. They recognized that Saint-Gaudens had great talent and this was the point that they really got on the Saint-Gaudens bandwagon and acknowledged that Saint-Gaudens was going to be this exemplar for the new school of American sculpture. With the Farragut, Saint-Gaudens said he was trying to strike away from the stuff that we have in America. Yes he had a figure, a Civil War figure on a pedestal, but on a wildly different pedestal from anything that had been seen before and that was the gift of his friendship and collaboration with the architect Stanford White who designed the pedestal. When he had his arrangement with Stanford White, what was so drastically different was that they lived and worked together that they shared the solution. This is not White's design or Gus's design. It's a joint design. And I think both men realized that they were making a contribution and that is in essence what greatness of American public memorials and monuments is - the collaborative effort of sculptors and architects. I think one of the extraordinary things to understand about American sculpture is that in a very brief amount of time we went from being stone cutters and wood carvers essentially not fine artists to maybe in fifty years had a real medium of sculpture. That's quite an achievement in this young country. The Farragut didn't change Gus immediately but it brought commissions to his door and it made him one of the new leaders of the new art. And what follows very quickly is the commission for the Deacon Chapin monument. We know that as The Puritan. Narration: There was something else that was different about this new art in public sculpture. It was the use of bronze as the medium of choice. So much can be done with a bronze surface and the finishing of the metal and the chasing and hammering and refining. And then of course in the coloring of the bronze surface, the modulation of the tones to bring out the character of the sculpture. In a way it helps impart the message that the sculptor or the client wants to put forth. Any young artist has to get jobs and as a young man Saint-Gaudens, like all struggling artists, took whatever he could find. He worked with John LaFarge at Trinity Church in Boston painting murals, but he also was introduced to Cornelius Vanderbilt the third in New York. Saint-Gaudens designed a fireplace, a clock and other figures there. Once Saint-Gaudens became established in art, once he became able to have his own studio, he was able to actually go out and find the jobs himself and he would do that by joining clubs. Stanford White introduced him to a number of the main social clubs in New York, the Century, the Players, where he would meet not only industrialists but other artists. His love was sculpture and he would try to get whatever work he could. Then as now the way you find that is by basically pounding the pavement. You go out and look. Narration: One of Saint-Gaudens most successful sources of income was creating portrait reliefs for his wealthy patrons. It was something he had begun in Europe and quickly mastered. A relief is not a three dimensional sculpture. It has a single primary perspective. It is in a way the bridge between sculpture and painting. Saint-Gaudens was told by his friend John LaFarge to think of sculpting bas-reliefs as painting a sculpture. And that's really the technique that he pursued in these incredible low relief sculptures. The relief comes gradually out of the background. Saint-Gaudens was able to model reliefs in very, very low relief - more so than anybody else. I believe because he had been so extensively involved with cameos. |
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For Saint-Gaudens, sculpture was all about projecting character and his most successful works are those that put forth the essence of the sitter and this is certainly true in his great relief portraits as well, whether it's a portrait of the innocence of childhood or a sick Robert Louis Stevenson. Saint-Gaudens was the consummate perfectionist, whether in a monument or a bas- relief commission and he did not stop until he was satisfied and got it right. Narration: Mark Twain labeled it "The Gilded Age." In the years since the Civil War, America had experienced unprecedented economic growth and while it did not always trickle down to the thousands of new immigrants that poured onto her shores everyday, it was a good time to be an artist. Since working with Saint-Gaudens on the Farragut Monument, Stanford White had become a prominent architect building colossal mansions for a new breed of wealthy patrons with the firm McKim, Meade and White. At the same time, Saint-Gaudens quickly learned how to mingle with the rich and the famous in order to obtain commissions. Together they carved out a good lifestyle and enjoyed the pleasures that come with success. In the gilded age there was enormous wealth that was made in America so people were building new mansions and residences all over the eastern seaboard and then they had to decorate them. So they had enormous space for paintings and sculpture. It's a world where there's an explosion of money after the Civil War. New York and Chicago are exploding. The trains are changing the way people travel. And the world begins to become smaller. It's a world where art is in the forefront of the great things that are happening. Buildings are being built. There are grand vistas and major public monuments being built. The major cities around the country are seeing that their responsibility to themselves and to their communities is to have great architecture and great art and great artists. Narration: She was named "The Huntress Diana" but everyone referred to her simply as "Diana." Placed on top of the largest pedestal ever to hold up a statue - Stanford White's Madison Square Garden. She was as controversial as she was beautiful. Diana was Saint-Gaudens' only nude female sculpture and she was absolutely one of the most beautiful things to see in New York at the time. She was lit up at night and she rotated and you would have the lights bouncing off her gilded surface in the evening and at night. And then in the day with the sun hitting that golden surface, it just was riveting. Then as now, nudity was a tremendously controversial issue and it was said that proper New Yorkers felt very uncomfortable about seeing this nude figure on the top of Madison Square Garden. And the fact that it was gilded and blazed in the sunlight and was incandescently lit at night, it made a lot of people feel very uncomfortable and earned a lot of critical censure, but on the other hand it is one of Saint-Gaudens' most iconic pieces now and was one of his most popular commercial works. It's obviously a classical figure, mythological figure, Diana the huntress. But I also like to think of it as a great classical American weathervane, it was meant to turn. Here again Saint-Gaudens' exploitation of the silhouette - something that he goes back, maybe not in a conscious way, but to that craft tradition that American folk tradition of not Diana's, but cows and Indians turning on barn roofs. Here Saint-Gaudens has taken that American idea and translated it into an urban, literally, modern setting. Narration: The original Diana was 18 feet tall and it quickly became apparent that it was too big for the building. So Saint-Gaudens created a smaller more refined 13-foot version that is the icon that we know today. For Saint-Gaudens, the Diana was more than just a professional success, it was also very personal. The model for the face was a Swedish woman by the name of Divida Clarke and he would eventually fell in love with her. It was no secret that Stanford White and Saint-Gaudens enjoyed the company of women and there were a number of affairs during their outings in New York but this one did not end. There was something about her that captivated him and he would use her likeness in a number of his works including the Amor Caritas. She had very beautiful, classical features, but he was also drawn to her as a person and eventually they would form a friendship, which would lead to an intimacy and eventually the birth of a child. Narration: In the spring of 1885, Saint-Gaudens, his wife Augusta and their young son, Homer, took the train to Cornish, New Hampshire - a farming community located at the foot of Mount Ascutney and nestled along the banks of the Connecticut River. Augusta desperately wanted to escape the frantic life of the city and a good friend of theirs, Charles Beaman, suggested that they rent an old inn that he owned. It was not far from the river and had an excellent view of the mountain. Saint-Gaudens wrote: "To persuade me to come, Mr. Beaman had said that there were "plenty of Lincoln shaped men up there." He was right. So during the summer of my arrival, I made my first sketch for the Standing Lincoln. I was so enchanted with the life and the scenery. I thought what a joy it is to come to the country." Saint Gaudens' brother Louis, his studio assistant, and a fine artist in his own right soon joined them and it wasn't long before the word spread and many other artists and friends began spending their summers in the area as well. It would become known as the Cornish Colony. He named the property Aspet. Aspet was where his father came from in the Pyrenees in southern France. He said: 'alright I'll name this after my father's birth place.' It's a beautiful area, mountainous area, pine forests. There was the Connecticut River and this huge mountain coming up behind it, Mount Ascutney - very different from anything Saint-Gaudens had seen. The Cornish colony began as a group of artists who were all friends of Saint-Gaudens. Some of them came with him when he first came, some of them came because he was here. It was not really set up as a school or as a formal entity. They were his friends. They were artists. They were painters, sculptors - later, performing artists, actors, actresses. They were the members of what was known as the American Renaissance. It's interesting in the nineteenth century - we think of these artists as rather formal, even stuffy kind of people. But when you see the accounts, they weren't at all. Narration: For Augusta - life in the country had begun with such promise - but as each summer passed and the Cornish Colony grew - she realized the New York social scene that she sought to escape had instead come with them. She was also gradually going deaf and became more and more reclusive - and less popular. Stanford White said "Why fate should have ordained that such a man should be harnessed to such a woman, heaven only knows." But it was Saint-Gaudens himself that realized the importance of Augusta in his life. He wrote to her from one of his frequent trips: "You are a noble woman Gussie and I love and respect you more than you have conception of. For our mutual piece of mind on this earth, I beg of you not to come down from the high place I hold you in my heart." Saint-Gaudens was deeply affected by the passing of his mother Mary but was proud to show off his son Homer to grandfather Bernard. And as each summer passed, they would make improvements to Aspet until it finally felt like home. Visitors would arrive from far and wide to spend time with the master artist who loved to play the flute while his wife played the piano. And when they had made the house all their own, Charles Beaman finally gave in and sold it to them. As much as he enjoyed the country, Saint-Gaudens was driven by his work. By the mid-1880's he had clearly established himself as the master of American sculpture. Daniel Chester French had become well know for his Minuteman in Concord, Massachusetts but even he would admit that Saint-Gaudens was the sculptor of choice. New commissions came in all the time and it took a small army of assistants to help him complete his work. Once he became established, Saint-Gaudens broke off into a direction that other people were not doing. What he realized very early on was that if he brought other people into work with him - assistants, he could take more commissions, do more jobs. So he set up a business of sculpture. Critics called it a corporate style of art. But in the nineteenth century that was not a bad thing. And he then established studios in Paris and in New York and eventually in Cornish, New Hampshire. So, at any given time he could have two or three studios working. So he could basically take any commission that came along. Saint-Gaudens was a man of thought. He was a man of idea a |
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As we've seen, Augustus Saint Gaudens was among the greatest American sculptors of the late 19th & early 20th centuries.. He created over 20 public monuments over his career. The beauty of his work still evokes awe and inspires artists today. Paul Sanderson, the producer and director of the documentary, has long appreciated the work of Saint Gaudens. TAKE SOT: 59:04 when I set out to make this film I wanted to do film that would make a difference and make a difference for people to know about st gaudens and rediscover him 59:10 TRK1: It's the 2nd film Sanderson has done on the gilded age artist.22 years apart. SOT: Paul: 46:56 the first film was just a short film didn't have enuf money to do complete film. 47:00 SOT: 47:09 all these years I've been wanting to do a longer version of this film…wonderful artist,.few know about it. 47:15 TRK2: The restoration of some monuments and new film technology only enhances Saint Gaudens masterpieces. SOT: Paul: 48:27 showing them in hi def and up close and personal …I mean you can't see his works better than you can right now 48:31 …both if you walked up yourself or me filming them:35 SOT: Beth: 52:11 you cover all the seasons in this film:13 SOT: Paul: 52:16 that was done on purpose.I'm from NE I love foliage, fall foliage.near and dear, if you've seen film.every in NE 2 weeks In October.like no other place in world wanted to make sure to get that the biggest comment that means most to me. 56:13 they say.they want to see the works personally:19 at the met…first person got up.I just want to tell you wonderful film want to go right down to Sherman monument in corner of 59 and 5th and that was great to inspire them to want to see his works."32 I hope this film does that 56:34 SOT: 56:39 do you think people in NH are aware of the estate and that he lived here? 56:44 it's a wonderful treasure:55 for state and surrounding states here in NE:58 57:01 we hope that more people will know about it thru this film:04 57:13 and so, if you like what you saw in the film you're going to really like it in person 57":15*** TRK: The Augustus Saint Gaudens historic site is a living tribute to the sculptor considered one of the most gifted artists of his time. 1:21:00 more than 100 examples of saint gaudens work can be found on the ground and in the buildings here.many of them in the little studio. Come on let's go take a look. 1:28: few know St gaudens works better than 1:28 few know st Gaudens works better Henry hello…apt. you can see in one of his most iconic works here.Diana done in 1880's tower of Madison square garden for NYC 1:58 it was classical nude…figure of Diana the huntress…but done in a 19th century realistic almost an earthy kind of way 2:11 |
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The Saint Gaudens estate hopes the film about his life and work and the new minting will draw visitors to the estate. You can tour the Saint-Gaudens home and studios from Memorial Day weekend thru October 31st. The trails and grounds of the estate are open year round. I'm Beth Carroll.thanks for watching. |
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A unit of the National Park Service, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, N.H. features the home, gardens, and studios of Augustus Saint-Gaudens , one of America's greatest sculptors. Surrounding the historic buildings and grounds are several hundred acres of upland forests, with sections of fields and woodlands, plus brooks and two ponds. Wonderful westward views and some 200 wildlife species await hikers and wildlife watchers at Saint Gaudens. The Cornish colony began as a group of artists who were all friends of Saint-Gaudens. Some of them came with him when he first came, some of them came because he was here. It was not really set up as a school or as a formal entity. They were his friends. They were artists. They were painters, sculptors - later, performing artists, actors, actresses. They were the members of what was known as the American Renaissance. It's interesting in the nineteenth century - we think of these artists as rather formal, even stuffy kind of people. But when you see the accounts, they weren't at all. Woodrow wilson tag |