Augustus Saint-Gaudens’sThe Puritan

Abstract

Dedicated in 1887 in Springfield, Massachusetts, The Puritan is a large bronze statue of a menacing figure clutching a huge Bible. Commissioned as a memorial to Deacon Samuel Chapin (1595–1675), The Puritan was designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and erected in an urban park surrounded by factories and tenements. After repeated vandalism, it was moved “uphill” to Springfield’s cultural quadrangle in 1899. Contextualizing The Puritan in geographic and affective terms, this essay argues that the statue’s public disavowal was conditioned by Saint-Gaudens’s general disdain for New England’s seventeenth-century founding fathers and in particular their fraught relationships with American Indians.