Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848 - 1907). Augustus Saint-Gaudens was an American sculptor of the Beaux-Arts generation who embodied the ideals of the American Renaissance. Raised in New York City, he traveled to Europe for further training and artistic study. After he returned to New York, he achieved major critical success for his monuments commemorating heroes of the American Civil War, many of which still stand. Saint-Gaudens created works such as the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common and grand equestrian monuments to Civil War generals: General John Logan Memorial in Chicago's Grant Park and William Tecumseh Sherman at the corner of New York's Central Park. Saint-Gaudens also created Classical works such as the Diana. He also used his design skills in numismatics. Most notably, he designed the $20 Saint Gaudens Double Eagle gold piece for the US Mint, considered one of the most beautiful American coins ever issued, as well as the $10 Indian Head gold eagle; both of these were minted from 1907 until 1933. In his later years he founded the Cornish Colony, an artistic colony that included notable painters, sculptors, writers, and architects. His brother Louis Saint-Gaudens, with whom he occasionally collaborated, was also a well-known sculptor. Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin, Ireland to an Irish mother and French father, Bernard Paul Ernest Saint-Gaudens, a shoemaker by trade from a small village in the French Pyrenees, Aspet, 15 kilometers from Saint-Gaudens. After his parents immigrated to America when he was six months of age, he was reared in New York City. In 1861, he became an apprentice to a cameo-cutter, Louis Avet, and took evening art classes at the Cooper Union in New York City. Two years later, he was hired as an apprentice of Jules Le Brethon, another cameo cutter, and enrolled at the National Academy of Design. At age 19, his apprenticeship was completed and he traveled to Paris in 1867, where he studied in the atelier of Francois Jouffroy at the Ecole 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, whom he married on June 1, 1877. The couple had one child, a son named Homer Saint-Gaudens. In 1874, Edwards Pierrepont, a prominent New York reformer, hired Saint-Gaudens to create a marble bust of himself. Pierrepont, a phrenologist, proved to be a demanding client, insisting that Saint-Gaudens make his head larger. Saint-Gaudens said that Pierrepont's bust seemed to be affected with some dreadful swelling disease and he later told a friend that he would give anything to get hold of that bust and smash it to atoms. 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. He collaborated with Stanford White again in 1892-94 when he created Diana as a weather vane 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, William Merritt Chase and Arthur Quartley. He was also a member of the Salmagundi Club in New York. In 1876, Saint-Gaudens received his first major commission: a monument to Civil War Admiral David Farragut, in New York's Madison Square; his friend Stanford White designed an architectural setting for it, and when it was unveiled in 1881, its naturalism, its lack of bombast and its siting combined to make it a tremendous success, and Saint-Gaudens' reputation was established. The commissions followed fast, including the colossal Standing Lincoln in Lincoln Park, Chicago in a setting by architect White, 1884-1887, considered the finest portrait statue in the United States, and a long series of memorials, funerary monuments and busts, including the Adams Memorial, the Peter Cooper Monument, and the John A. Logan Monument. Arguably the greatest of these monuments is the bronze bas-relief that forms the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common, 1884-1897, which Saint-Gaudens labored on for 14 years; even after the public version had been unveiled, he continued with further versions.