The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (69 page)

It was the largest piece Saint-Gaudens had yet attempted, and the wonder is someone who had begun as a cameo cutter and mastered that tiny, exacting craft to such perfection could now, not so long afterward, undertake a project of such colossal scale. But the lessons of cameo cutting, of working “in the small,” were not to be dismissed, even when working so large.

His inspiration had been the taller-than-life marble St. George by the Italian Renaissance sculptor Donatello, which he had seen in Florence and never forgotten. Donatello was his hero, second only to Michelangelo, and the effect of the St. George, of a man standing in repose yet clearly ready to take on the world, was just what he hoped to attain with his Farragut.

In how he faced a difficult task, Saint-Gaudens was at heart much akin to his subject. “Conceive an idea. Then stick to it. Those who hang on
are the only ones who amount to anything,” he often said. In a tribute published following Farragut’s death in 1870, the
Army and Navy Journal
had written, “Once satisfied that a course must be pursued, it was utterly impossible to hold Farragut back from it.”

Saint-Gaudens’s Farragut had begun with a clay study of a nude figure two feet high. “Don’t leave any serious study to struggle with in the big,” was another of his working rules. It was in the small-scale model that the most serious attentions must be focused, “the whole ensemble together in the small,” he liked to say.

The procedure was then to enlarge the two-foot figure to life-size and again in clay, but supported now by an armature of iron braces. Once work on the life-size statue was complete, it would serve as the model for still another statue of more than eight feet in height, this again done in clay and with an even heavier armature.

The giant clay figure would require still more work before a plaster mold could be made, in sections, from which a giant plaster statue would then be cast, and it in turn would need considerable final going over before taken to the foundry to be cast in bronze.

At every stage it was a complex process involving many others besides the sculptor, and it took much time and close attention.

The subject of all these efforts, David Glasgow Farragut, was a man Saint-Gaudens had never known, never laid eyes on. He had only pictures to go by—photographs and engravings—plus descriptions provided by the admiral’s widow and son. As he would also admit privately, “I don’t fully understand about the sea.”

In real life the hero had stood about five feet six. To transpose the life-size clay model into its final heroic scale required that hundreds of measurements be made with calipers, and so a large scaffold had to be built beside the statue from which the workers could reach the uppermost portions of the figure.

But the mathematics of the system and even the most skilled use of calipers were never sufficient in and of themselves. The artist’s eye and the desire to breathe life into the clay had to be the deciding factors at almost every stage.

Saint-Gaudens would write of the “toughness” of the sculptor’s challenge,
all the problems to be dealt with, the different helpers, the equipment and rubbish, and “all the while trying to soar into the blue.”

He excused the delays that came with the work on the ground that a sculptor’s efforts endured so long that it was nearly a crime to fail to do everything possible to achieve a worthy result. He had a terrible dread of making a bad sculpture. “A poor picture goes into the garret,” he would write, “books are forgotten, but the bronze remains, to amuse or shame the populace and perpetuate one of our various idiocies.”

The finished work had to convey the reality and importance of a singular personality. It had to be more than “a good likeness.” It had to express the character of the man.

“Farragut’s legs seem to be pretty troublesome,” Gussie reported. Farragut must stand braced on proper sea legs, Gus insisted. But how to achieve that?

A friend from New York, the editor of
Scribner’s Monthly,
Richard Watson Gilder, who was visiting Paris and was short like Farragut, agreed to pose for the legs. Still Gus fretted. “He has been very much bothered by one of Farragut’s legs, and has been working on it for weeks. He is not satisfied yet,” Gussie wrote later, just before he took ill.

The admiral’s buttons and braid, his cap, sword, all had to be true to fact and a natural part of him, like his stance. Greater still was the importance of the face, and the face, the head, unlike a portrait on canvas, had to look right from every angle. The whole work must look right from every angle.

Even with Saint-Gaudens back on the job following his illness, the work fell steadily further behind schedule. Expenses kept mounting, and to her parents, who were still faithfully providing financial help, Gussie felt obliged to explain what the work now involved and why even more help was needed. “Am sorry to bother you so much but we must have some money or else collapse,” she wrote bluntly at one point. Just the wheels of the dolly on which the clay model turned cost $40, she emphasized.

Her unshaken belief in her husband was plain. She wanted those at home to know how hard he was working and how much he had to put up with on the job. Almost no one seemed to understand how much he needed time to work and to think without interruptions. “He is very much
bothered by visitors [to the studio] at all hours. He can’t turn them out. He isn’t made so. …”

“Gus is working on Farragut’s left leg today,” she wrote on May 8, 1879. A week later she could report, “Augustus … seems to be conquering the legs which have been his
bête noire
.” On May 30 she could at last announce, “Farragut has two legs to stand on,” but had to say also that Farragut still “bothers Gus a great deal. He finds it hard work to satisfy himself.”

By June he had moved on to the flap on the admiral’s coat, intending that it appear to be blowing in the wind. To Gussie it was a marvel how he made the silk lining and the cloth of the coat look as if made of silk and cloth.

She felt increasingly happy—with what he was creating and with their life together. One Sunday they spent an entire afternoon in the Bois de Boulogne, just the two of them, picking wildflowers and sitting talking under the trees. She had never loved Paris more. “It is strange how fascinating the life here becomes after living a couple of years. There is always so much to see and do.” She painted a portrait of a friend, the wife of an expatriate American doctor named Farlow. The doctor was so pleased with the result he asked her to do him as well.

Work on the pedestal with Stanford White continued, but when, with the return of summer, White chose to go off to Italy, Gus decided to go, too. His doctors told him he needed rest and a change of scene. Gussie traveled with her sister Genie to Château d’Oex in Switzerland, to wait for Gus to join them there. He arrived on August 6, bringing her a beautiful lamp to hang in their parlor in Paris, and together with White they stayed on in Switzerland for another few days.

The time away had done Gus great good. “[He] feels like a lion,” she said. Decisions on the pedestal had been resolved, and White returned to New York. All was fine, it seemed.

But something had gone wrong between Gus and White. What happened is not altogether clear. The nearest thing to an explanation was provided later by sister Genie. Gus’s “friendship, or perhaps I should say
affection, was limited,” Genie wrote, due to certain sides to White’s personality and way of life.

In early days, mingled with White’s enthusiasm, extraordinary activity and capacity for work, kindly instinct and friendliness, which made him personally attractive, were his aggressive, violent prejudice and a certain snobbishness that annoyed [Gus]. …

Gus cared nothing about food or clothes, no more now than in his student days in Paris. He would wear shirts until they were filled with holes, as Gussie lamented, and, according to Genie, he came to view with contempt White’s adoration of food. Food was the way White “showed his self-indulgence in those days,” Genie said, and recalled how, when crossing a mountain pass in Switzerland, White insisted on delaying everything for several hours in order that he could taste some famous dish at a local inn, which infuriated Gus.

Undoubtedly there was more to it than that, and whatever the issue, it appears to have begun in Italy. In a letter to White later, Gus said he was “feeling sorry for things [he had done] in Italy,” but in response White urged no more apologizing: “If ever a man acted well [in Italy], you did, and I ought to have been kicked for many reasons.”

Whatever the cause of the disagreement, the friendship was not broken; it only cooled somewhat. Their work together continued.

Much of great importance had still to be resolved, not the least of which were the final height and location of the monument.

Correspondence between Gus and White continued. There were questions about the kind of stone to be used for the pedestal and the design of two relief angels representing Courage and Loyalty that Gus was to do. Union Square, at Broadway and 14th Street, remained the favorite choice for the location among members of the Farragut Commission, and Saint-Gaudens was inclined to agree, though he had some concern about the height of the statue of Lafayette by Bartholdi in the square.

In New York, White went to look over the site and reported that the Lafayette stood not more than eight feet, four inches. “If you stick to eight feet, six inches, I do not think you will go much wrong,” he told Saint-Gaudens.

White thought Madison Square Park, farther uptown between 23rd and 26th streets, on Fifth Avenue, and in particular at the corner of 26th and Fifth, was a far preferable spot—“a quiet and distinguished place … where the aristocratic part of the avenue begins … and the stream of people walking down Fifth Avenue would see it at once.” He also reminded Gus that Delmonico’s, the most fashionable dining place in town, was directly across the street, and Gus understood what that alone meant to White.

“
Go for Madison Square
,” Gus responded.

He and White both knew how important the monument could be to New York, as well as their own careers. He was calling on everything in his power, Gus wrote to former minister to France John Dix, a member of the commission, “to break away from the regular conventional statues.”

October 14, 1879: … Aug is just as busy and bothered as he can be. He has three men at work in the studio besides Louis, and the molder much of the time and so much going on distracts him very much. They are getting ready to enlarge the statue and yesterday they made some mistakes and it took the whole lot of them all today to undo and [re]do what they did yesterday. A sculptor friend of Aug told him he would be made nearly wild with it and that for a long time apparently nothing would seem to be accomplished. I tell you all this to give you an idea of what is going on. Aug is going to enlarge the head in wax and will do it here [in the apartment] in the evenings. He is fussing over the Farragut and working on angles [for the pedestal] now. I wish I could help him but there seems to be nothing I can do but keep the house going and his clothes in order. Louis works as hard as he can and is never satisfied unless he is doing something. As daylight is so precious
we are going to try going to bed at nine and getting up at half past six or thereabouts. I don’t know how it will work, but we will try anyway. …