The National Park Service Celebrates Saint-Gaudens

New Hampshire’s only national park is a bucolic outdoor museum meant for art lovers and hikers alike.

A few months ago, I visited the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park in Cornish in southwestern New Hampshire, across the Connecticut River from Vermont. I hadn’t written about a sculptor in a few months, and, until now, I’ve never written about a national park. The Saint-Gaudens site is indeed part of our glorious system of national parks from Acadia in Maine to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. At 175 acres, it’s not the smallest national park.

It is the only national park in New Hampshire. The site preserves the memory and work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), who spent summers there from 1885 until he moved to Cornish permanently in 1900. With this summer nearly over, I think it’s a good time to write about a place that serenely mixes art, nature, and pleasant rather than scorching weather.

It’s a high-quality, low-pressure place. It’s mostly open space and woods, but it shows the artist’s home and, in a lovely, landscaped park, dozens of his sculptures, beautifully cast in bronze. Saint-Gaudens, like, say, Rodin or Remington, envisioned many works produced in editions, with some finished works bigger than others. The works we see aren’t, of course, in their original settings of, among other places, Rock Creek Cemetery in D.C. or Madison Square Park in Manhattan. It’s best to see the Saint-Gaudens site in New Hampshire as an open-air museum, with a view of Vermont’s Mount Ascutney in the distance.

Last year, on Memorial Day weekend, I wrote about Chesterwood, Daniel Chester French’s home in West Stockbridge in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. It was the centennial anniversary for the Lincoln Memorial, French’s universally known sculpture. French did lots of other work but nothing nearly so iconic. Saint-Gaudens, roughly French’s contemporary, made hit after hit. As American artists go, he’s among the transcendent.

The Saint-Gaudens park experience can start anywhere since almost all the sculptures are outdoors and the grounds are open year-round until sunset. There’s a blissfully small and to-the-point visitor center, including a nice shop with books, T-shirts, and souvenir trinkets, but, mostly, visitors are on their own if that’s their wish. I took a tour led by a young ranger who charmingly finessed questions such as “Where’s the Lincoln Memorial?” With a kind smile, and in the nicest way, she said, “Wrong artist, wrong state.” I scowled and growled, “That’s Daniel Chester French,” implying that “French” was another word for “imbecile.”

The park has an inviting open-air pavilion anchored by Saint-Gaudens’s first public commission, a monument to Admiral Farragut, he of “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” Civil War fame. Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin, came to America as a baby with his Irish mother and French father, and trained initially as a cameo cutter for high-end jewelry. He later studied sculpture in Paris and most intently in Rome. In 1876, he was second to John Quincy Adams Ward in the competition for the Farragut job. The over-committed Ward said, “Let him have it,” and thus was born Saint-Gaudens’s career.

The bronze sculpture premiered in 1881 in Madison Square Park, where it still sits, though the impressively carved bluestone base is now in Cornish, topped by a later, also bronze version. After nearly 150 years, is it a tad pedestrian? I don’t think so. In the late 1870s, there wasn’t much public sculpture showing prominent civic leaders, outside of cemeteries, so Saint-Gaudens was doing something unusual. The sculpture is dynamic, even in the park’s rural setting.

The Farragut he created is bold and taut like a prizefighter and very real. He could have stepped from Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, then the century’s best-selling memoir, about a sea voyage in the 1830s from Boston to California. Saint Gaudens’s creation is both a portrait likeness of Farragut, who died in 1870, and an ideal of the ruddy, resolute man of the sea, whether of the frigate or the fishing boat. Winslow Homer hadn’t yet perfected his doughty, commanding sailor type in pictures such as Eight Bells. Saint-Gaudens beat him to it.

While he was in Rome, Saint-Gaudens absorbed the neoclassical, sometimes didactic style of Harriet Hosmer and William Wetmore Story — American expats based there — but he drew as much from Donatello, Verrocchio, and Ghiberti, whose figures are limber and whose faces are plastic, not frozen.

He did even them one better. Farragut looks as if he’s standing on the bow of a ship. Saint-Gaudens designed the base, with stylized waves that have to be an early incursion of Art Nouveau style in America, and allegorical female figures representing courage and loyalty. Saint-Gaudens worked with the architect Stanford White to use the base to advance the storyline rather than merely support the sculpture. This was fresh, at least in America, as was making a base where people could sit. The curved bench is actually comfortable. Sitters looking out as well as Farragut catch the attention of pedestrians in the park.

Probably the biggest surprise for visitors are Saint-Gaudens’s bronze portrait reliefs. The portrait relief in marble was an Italian Renaissance staple, famously made by Donatello, but it’s an ancient technique used in Assyrian royal palaces and the frieze of the Parthenon. Cameo cutter that Saint-Gaudens was, bigger reliefs came easily.

Part of the Farragut pavilion displays a selection of Saint-Gaudens’s reliefs. I’m not sure how well this works, given the natural lighting, which I think is too intense. They start small, as friendship tokens, with witty, personal inscriptions, so they’re meant to be seen in domestic spaces. Saint-Gaudens wasn’t doing something entirely new — in Paris relief portraiture was in vogue — but it was new in America.

They’re cast in bronze. This medium invites tiny details in hair, ears, and skin, with lighting sometimes caressing the bronze and sometimes dancing on it. The figures, mostly in profile, are very formal, even hieratic, but lifelike, too. The most famous is the big rectangular relief of Robert Louis Stevenson from around 1887. Stevenson modeled, writing a letter and propped up in bed, since he was an invalid.

Diana, from around 1892, is Saint-Gaudens’s only female nude, but what a nude, and what placement. Two early versions of the sculpture perched on top of the tower of Madison Square Garden, not today’s crappy, ratty version of the complex, and not near Macy’s, but on top of the original Moorish Revival pile that was actually near Madison Square. Diana was the Roman goddess of wild animals, the moon, and hunting, so what better place for her than New York’s premiere venue for circuses and sports?

Diana, originally at 16 feet, made Madison Square Garden the tallest building in New York by a few feet, but only for a bit. She’s elegant and lithe and not, like many takes on Diana in art, a bruiser. Saint-Gaudens fiddled with her size and weight since Diana was intended to move like a weathervane. He replaced his first version — too heavy — with a smaller version made from copper sheeting. The park site’s version is cast in bronze.

I’ve never seen the Adams Memorial, the grave marker for Henry Adams’s wife, Marian, known as Clover, in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Clover, who committed suicide, was a socialite, talented photographer, and intellectual from an old, rich Boston family whose blood, like Adams’s, was what my father would call “too thin” from cousins marrying cousins over multiple generations. This is a Boston Brahmin condition, though who can be cheery as Henry Adams’s wife?

Finished in 1891, it’s spare and aloof, like the Sphinx, telling no secrets about the afterlife. The figure’s not a likeness of Clover but an ideal meant to envision both death and grief. Adams advised Saint-Gaudens to look at Buddhist sculpture from Japan. The artist John LaFarge, who, after Clover’s death, traveled with Adams to Tahiti, Samoa, and Japan, worked with Saint-Gaudens in developing his design.

The figure’s robe is heavy but flowing, her face is still, but her hand is drawn to her face as if she’s in a trance. She’s there, and not there, physical but shrouded. The press named the memorial “Grief,” which Adams didn’t like. Too frank and transparent, I suspect, for a man with lots of Puritan blood, thin as it was. What else would you call it? Sant-Gaudens proposed “The Mystery of the Hereafter and the Peace That Passeth All Understanding.” Thankfully, he wasn’t in the billboard business.

In D.C.’s Rock Creek Cemetery, the Adams Memorial sits on a small stone patio in a conifer garden with a stone bench built into the ledge surrounding it. This ambiance isn’t entirely reproduced at the national park in Cornish, but no matter. It’s powerful and, again, different. Last year I wrote about Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston. It’s filled with memorials from the era of Grief. They’re moving but more likely to be schmaltzy, in a good, Victorian way. Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture makes grief or sadness or inexplicable loss universal.

So, two sculptures of women, and they couldn’t be more different or more right.

There’s a third. In 1904, President Roosevelt, describing American coinage as “artistically of atrocious hideousness,” suggested hiring Saint-Gaudens to design new coins. Saint-Gaudens agreed. The two coins, $10 and $20 gold pieces, are thought to be the most beautiful of American coins. It was, we believe, Saint-Gaudens’s last project. The actual coins and some plaster models are on view.

The personification of liberty as a woman starts in Rome, but liberty and victory go arm and arm. Winged Victory, or the Nike of Samothrace, at the Louvre, was excavated and images of it published in Saint-Gaudens’s lifetime, and his design owes something to it. Liberty Leading the People, Delacroix’s 1830 opus, inspired him, too. Delacroix gave his figure a protruding bosom, something too profane for Americans, but Saint-Gaudens got away with quite a bit of leg, though covered with thin cloth. That’s far more than Cole Porter’s glimpse of stocking.

A billowing peplos, 46 stars, an olive branch in one hand, and, since he was commissioned by Roosevelt, a big stick in another, plus her bold, protruding foot and sun rays make for a rousing, full-figured lady. The abundance of detail, sad to say, especially Lady Liberty’s comely bulk, made minting nearly impossible. It took nearly a dozen strikes to impress all the details, and then the coins wouldn’t stack. It took a great deal of fiddling with the design by Mint artists to produce something practical, but by that time it was 1907 and Saint-Gaudens was dying and then dead. He died at 59 after a long illness during which his studio assistants filled the void that his debilitation had left on execution and even design.

Saint-Gaudens’s Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, from 1897, commands a prime space by the Boston Common and has a grand story. At the Cornish site, it’s in a special garden bounded by yews. At the time, no American artist had combined a freestanding equestrian figure — Shaw and his horse — and a high-relief cast of soldiers. This is also the first, and for decades the only, public sculpture to salute the heroism of black soldiers in the Civil War.

The scene shows Shaw and his troops marching off to war in May 1863. Shaw would die in the Second Battle of Fort Wagner, near Charleston, S.C., a few weeks later. An angel overhead holds poppies, a symbol of sacrifice and death to come. Angel aside, the Shaw monument is documentary — grand and processional, yes, but real. Saint-Gaudens used 40 black models so he’d get different ages, heights, and faces. The casting at the Saint-Gaudens site isn’t as big as the Boston version and doesn’t have the ambiance of the State House or the Common, but how often do any of us get to Boston?

The house where Saint-Gaudens lived is big and airy and, to me, a typical summer home for rich New Yorkers in the day. After his death, his widow lived there until she died in 1926. Then the property went to the nonprofit Saint-Gaudens Memorial, which ran it as a museum until the National Park Service took it in the ’60s.

The house has almost all of the family’s furniture and art, so there’s a sense of the family living there, but the high point of the site is the outdoor sculpture. Saint-Gaudens’s studio is there, too. It’s good for the vibes, and after seeing Grief, I felt tuned to the Other Side, but an artist’s studio without a mess doesn’t entirely work for me. Saint-Gaudens also designed the gardens. I visited, alas, off-season, but they’re said to be nice.

The Cornish site does a deep dive into his work, with casts of The Puritan from the mid 1880s, the 1888 equestrian sculpture of William Tecumseh Sherman near the southeast entrance to Central Park, and Amor Caritas from the late 1890s. The park’s version of Amor Caritas, or Love Charity, is gilded to a very high gloss indeed. It looks like molten sunshine.

His Standing Lincoln, from 1887, preceded French’s sitting Lincoln and the Lincoln Memorial by nearly 35 years. Saint-Gaudens, as would French, used plaster casts of Lincoln’s hands and face, but Saint-Gaudens found a model — a farmer near Cornish — as tall and lithe as Lincoln. Early in the project, Saint-Gaudens decided to portray Lincoln the man rather than Lincoln the head of state, emphasizing his courage, self-control, homely rigor, and what’s best called majestic melancholy.

Saint-Gaudens wasn’t the first American artist immersed in what was au courant in Paris or London. He was, though, a leader of the pack of Americans who were trained formally in Europe, who shuttled back and forth, drew from European contemporary art, and were global in outlook. Sargent and Whistler were his friends, Whistler to the point where Saint-Gaudens saw him as a pest. Samuel Clemens, or Mark Twain, and Saint-Gaudens were opera buddies.

Saint-Gaudens was a practiced networker and friend-raiser. La Farge, Stanford White, and Charles McKim were early cronies, but Saint-Gaudens practiced the old saying “the whole is greater than its parts” when he built what was called the Cornish Art Colony.

This loose association of artists thrived from the 1890s into the Teens. Thomas Dewing, Charles Platt, George de Forest Brush, Maxfield Parrish, Kenyon Cox, and Paul Manship visited Cornish and Windsor in Vermont off and on during the summers. None was bleeding-edge, but each was modern in his own way. New York actors, art writers, novelists, and poets visited for rest, cool weather, and new voices. The park sponsors scholarship and exhibitions on the comings and goings in Cornish. This kind of interdisciplinary mix in a country setting was a Saint-Gaudens experiment and something new. How could something new not come from a retreat where Ethel Barrymore and Marie Dressler played?

The park service does a great job. Art isn’t its claim to fame, but the presentation works. The many sculptures are a giant part of the site’s success, but the arrangement and interpretation are straightforward. The Saint-Gaudens park has its own curator, and she and the rest of the staff have done something that’s not easy and few curators know how to do. They’ve made the place meaningful to the scholar and the hiker.

Without banging us over the head, the park service teaches us what made Saint-Gaudens great as well as what made him modern. He took the old neoclassical tradition and made it human. He merged idealism with realism, the heroic with the commonplace, this world and the next. And he was infinitely clever in doing it.

The Saint-Gaudens site hosts the National Park Service’s oldest, continuous sculptor-in-residence. It has supported artists since 1969 with a studio and stipend, so it’s creativity time for the artist, but the public benefits from demonstrations and workshops. Sean Hunter Williams from Barre in Vermont is this year’s pick. Barre is the granite capital of Vermont and a sculpture hub.

Williams is a very talented figurative sculptor. He’s doing lots of relief sculpture these days, so Saint-Gaudens must be an inspiration. Good for the park service and the site’s volunteers and donors for stewarding this program.

What a treasure the Saint-Gaudens park is, and in rural New Hampshire very close to I-91. It’s essential visiting.