Augustus Saint-Gaudens - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Born in Dublin to a French father and an Irish mother, Saint-Gaudens was raised in New York, after his parents immigrated to America when he was six months of age. He was apprenticed to a cameo-cutter but also took art classes at the Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design.

At 19, his apprenticeship completed, he traveled to Paris in 1867, where he studied in the atelier of François Jouffroy at the École des Beaux-Arts.

In 1870, he left Paris for Rome, to study art and architecture, and worked on his first commissions. There he met a deaf American art student, Augusta Fisher Homer, whose sister was Elizabeth Fisher Nichols, whom he married on June 1, 1877.

In 1876, he won a commission for a bronze David Farragut Memorial. He rented a studio at 49 rue Notre Dame des Champs. Stanford White designed the pedestal. It was unveiled on May 25, 1881, in Madison Square Park. collaborated with Stanford White again in 1892-94 when he created Diana as a weathervane for the second Madison Square Garden building in New York City; a second version used is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with several reduced versions in museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The statue stood on a 300-foot-high tower, making "Diana" the highest point in the city. It was also the first statue in that part of Manhattan to be lit at night by electricity. The statue and its tower was a landmark until 1925 when the building was demolished.

In New York, he was a member of the Tilers, a group of prominent artists and writers, including Winslow Homer (his wife's fourth cousin), William Merritt Chase and Arthur Quartley.