‘Mingled Feelings’: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, American Sculptors and Britain

Abstract

If Paris was the undisputed proving ground for late-nineteenth-century American artists, what was London? For most Beaux Arts-trained painters and sculptors with Anglo roots, London played a formative role in international reputation building, even if a ‘second city’ one. While Dublin-born Augustus Saint-Gaudens had a British presence, especially at the end of his career, it was not deliberately cultivated. This paper examines an unusual case: Saint-Gaudens’ indifferent relationship with England, despite high-society patrons, several exhibition appearances and his election as an honorary foreign member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1906. Instead, it was his English and American colleagues – all international cosmopolites – who put Saint-Gaudens forth as the model American sculptor on London’s stage, serving as his press agents, handlers and business managers. What were their motivations for introducing Saint-Gaudens to an English audience? And why was Saint-Gaudens largely recalcitrant, unswayed by the ‘American Anglomania’ that captivated his countrymen? In this paper, I focus on Saint-Gaudens’ interactions with several leading London-based arts figures in order to place England in the context of his overall career. His critical champion, Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Century Magazine, was responsible for the sculptor’s earliest connections with English artists and literati, including writer Edmund Gosse, who served as the Century’s London agent. Saint-Gaudens thus became acquainted with Gosse’s great friend, Hamo Thornycroft, who promoted his work and reputation for twenty-five years. Through American painter Will Low, Saint-Gaudens met Robert Louis Stevenson, and in 1887 modelled his portrait in New York. Sidney Colvin, Stevenson’s editor and keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum, was a second major force in promoting Saint-Gaudens in England. In 1894, Colvin allowed his superb Stevenson cast (Tate Britain) to be exhibited at the Summer Exhibition of the New Gallery. The same year Saint-Gaudens was awarded the commission for the Stevenson Memorial (dedicated 1904) for St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, with Colvin and Lord Rosebery among the ‘elite and nobility’ (as Saint-Gaudens put it) serving on the committee. The third avenue of exploration involves London-based American expatriates, particularly John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler. They took great personal interest in constructing Saint-Gaudens’ image as an ambassador of American sculpture in England. Their most frequent interactions took place after Saint-Gaudens returned to Paris in 1897 to complete the Sherman Monument (1892–1903, Grand Army Plaza, New York). Saint-Gaudens regularly visited London during the next three years, with Sargent immersing the sculptor into a collegial fraternity of artists. In 1898 Whistler spearheaded Saint-Gaudens’ election as an honorary foreign member of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers; Saint-Gaudens exhibited only once – in 1898, although there was a posthumous display of seventeen works in 1909, negotiated through American-born Joseph Pennell, that was indifferently received by English critics.