Augustus Saint-Gaudens Civil War Monuments

The greatest sculptor of the Beaux-Arts era, Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), secured his place in the pantheon of American artists with his dynamic portrayals of Civil War heroes. This survey of the life and work of the influential sculptor will focus on his heroic, yet compassionate 1887 Abraham Lincoln: The Man (or Standing Lincoln) in Chicago’s Lincoln Park as representative of Saint-Gaudens’s method, art, and time. By also looking at his first commission, the Admiral David Farragut Monument in New York’s Madison Square Park, and his final work, the General Sherman Monument at New York’s Central Park, and studying the magisterial Shaw Memorial/54th Massachusetts Regiment on the Boston Common, this talk will give students an appreciation of Saint-Gaudens’s pioneering integration of architecture, landscape design, and monumental sculpture.