The Medicine of Art by Elizabeth L. Lee;

Author:Elizabeth L. Lee;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781501346880
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

4

Chasing a Cure in Cornish

Health—is the thing! That’s my conclusion.

—Augusts Saint-Gaudens (1901)1

Diagnosis

In October 1897, Augustus Saint-Gaudens left New York City for Paris, explaining he was “nervous and completely disaffected with America.” At the height of his career, and widely viewed as the nation’s most important sculptor, Saint-Gaudens had recently unveiled three major monuments—the Peter Cooper Monument (1897) in New York, the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial (1896) in Boston, and the General John Logan Memorial (1897) in Chicago—and was exhausted. However, his exhaustion was not only due to overwork but also from the strain of an urban industrial environment. He complained of New York’s “infernal noise, dirt, and confusion,” especially outside his 36th Street studio, with its “maddening electric cars . . . the ambulance-wagons tearing by . . . and the occasional frantic fire-engine racing through it all, with bells clanging, fire, smoke, hell, and cinders,” as he described it.2 These were the kinds of nerve-rattling conditions George Beard had in mind when he attributed the epidemic of neurasthenia to fast-paced living in late nineteenth-century America.

Saint-Gaudens had lived in Paris from 1867 to 1870 as a student at the École des Beaux-Arts, and on a subsequent return less than a decade later when he worked on important early commissions, including the Farragut Monument (1879–80) and the unfinished Morgan tomb angels (1879–80, 1883). He returned in 1897 as a mature and accomplished artist with an international reputation, which did not go unappreciated in France.3 In 1899, the French government purchased Amor Caritas (Plate 6). The following year, he won Grand Prize at the Exposition Universelle and became a corresponding member of the Société des Beaux Arts. In 1900, Saint-Gaudens was awarded a coveted cross of the French Legion of Honor, a sure sign of his success and a high point of his career. In addition, he had supportive friends and colleagues in Paris as well as first-rate bronze-casting foundries that allowed him to develop novel aspects of both his large and small-scale works.4

These professional accolades aside, the move from New York to Paris had little impact on the sculptor’s health. In a letter to his wife, Augusta, Saint-Gaudens complained that he still felt “depressed and blue,” admitting to what he called “a complete absence of ambition, a carelessness about all that I have cared so much about before,” and even a “desire to be ended with life.” He closed the letter despairing, “There is too much misery and unhappiness in the world, and all this struggle for beauty seems so vain and hopeless.”5 He tried lifting his spirits with a trip to Italy, revisiting some of his favorite haunts with his colleague and friend Alfred Garnier. They also traveled to the foothills of the Pyrenees, where Saint-Gaudens’s father was born. It was the sculptor’s first visit to the area, and when he arrived, he found “that singular sense of being at home where one has never been before,” which he attributed to “inherited memory” from his father.6 However, none of this brought about a substantial shift in health.

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