Art: A Private Skill

When he died in 1907, Augustus Saint-Gaudens was solidly established as America’s greatest sculptor, the creator of heroic public monuments such as New York’s equestrian General Sherman, Chicago’s standing Lincoln and Washington’s Adams Memorial. His smaller, more intimate portrait reliefs are equally distinguished—naturally enough for an artist who started his career as a cameo cutter. In the first major exhibition of Saint-Gaudens’ work in 60 years, Washington’s National Portrait Gallery assembled 56 pieces, including portraits of such public figures as Architect Stanford White and Writers William Dean Howells and Robert Louis Stevenson. Among the best are portraits of private citizens.

“Most sweet and worthy wife and mother,” reads the Latin inscription on the posthumous high relief of Louise Miller Rowland, a New York judge’s wife who died prematurely—and the sensitively modeled face confirms the epitaph. More characteristic of Saint-Gaudens’ portraiture is the low relief of the children of New York Lawyer Prescott Hall Butler. To the two sturdy boys in their Scottish kilts, the sculptor has brought the understanding of a psychologist. The youngster on the left looks ahead, stolid and unafraid, but his older brother is already touched with care, and places his arm protectively around the younger. Dr. Henry Shiff, an intimate of Saint-Gaudens, was a surgeon in the Confederate Army who retired to Rome after the Civil War and there aided the sculptor when he was a struggling beginner. The refined strength of this tribute to a lifelong friendship sums up the sculptor’s advice to his pupils: “Develop technique and then hide it.”