The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

  In addition to the Farragut in its various stages, which Gus positioned at the center of the studio, he was busy with a number of low reliefs in clay, and had still another project of importance under way.

  Before leaving New York for Paris, he had been asked to help with the new Trinity Church in Boston. Henry Hobson Richardson, the architect chosen to design the church, had assigned the decoration of the interior to a gifted artist, John La Farge, who in turn had recruited Saint-Gaudens to assist him. Like Saint-Gaudens, Richardson was a product of the École des Beaux-Arts, and was emerging as one of America’s most brilliant architects. La Farge, too, had studied in Paris, though briefly, and Saint-Gaudens jumped at the chance to work with both of them. (He would later call LaFarge “a spur to higher endeavor equal if not greater than any other I have received.”) On the eve of Saint-Gaudens’s departure for Paris, La Farge had asked him to do an altar screen, a sculptured panel of angels in high relief, for St. Thomas Church in New York. Now this, too, occupied long hours in the Paris studio.

  Two others of importance who had worked on Trinity Church and thus became friends of Saint-Gaudens were architects Charles McKim and Stanford White. Still in their twenties, they had since left Richard-son’s employ—McKim to start his own firm, White to see something of the world. Saint-Gaudens liked them both, but particularly White, whose high spirits and humor, uninhibited love of art and architecture and music, seemed as limitless as his energy.

  White had grown up in New York in an atmosphere of art and music and books. His father was a recognized authority on Shakespeare, a composer and cellist. As a boy, Stanford had shown exceptional talent for drawing and painting, but La Farge, a friend of the family who was constantly short of money, had warned that as an artist he would have trouble supporting himself, and told him to take up architecture. So at age nineteen he went to work as an apprentice to Richardson.

  He and Saint-Gaudens had met first in New York. White was climbing the cast-iron stairway in the German Savings Bank Building one day when he heard a strong tenor voice at full volume singing the Andante of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Deciding to investigate, he found Gus at work in his studio.

  The friendship with Charles McKim came a little later, and according to Saint-Gaudens, it was their “devouring love of ice cream” that brought them together.

  Early in 1878, hearing that White was planning a trip to Europe, Saint-Gaudens wrote to say he was “pegging away” at the Farragut, but that the limited interest of his subject’s clothing made the job “a hard tug.” From the point of view of sculpture, Saint-Gaudens disliked modern clothing. Here he had only a cap, sword, field glasses, belt, and buttons to work with—not much, he lamented, adding, “When you come over I want to talk with you about the pedestal. Perhaps something might be done with that.”

  White’s response came at once, “I hope you will let me help you with the Farragut pedestal. … Then I should go down to Fame, even if it is bad, reviled for making a poor base for a good statue.” In June, White reported he was on his way to Paris and that McKim was coming, too.

  They arrived in midsummer, 1878, and after extended discussions with the sculptor in his crowded “ball-room studio,” and much conviviality with Gus, his wife, and friends—dining at Foyot’s, a favorite restaurant of students beside the Luxembourg Gardens, seeing Sarah Bernhardt in Racine’s Phèdre—they succeeded in convincing Gus it was time he took a break and head off with them to the south of France.

  Gus was itching to go. As he wrote long afterward, there had been, before White’s arrival, “little of the adventurous swing of life” he had once known in his student days.

  Gussie encouraged him to go, apparently. It seems the only thing she ever flatly said no to was his wish that they get a dog.

  The stated purpose of the expedition was to look at Gothic and Roman architecture along the Rhône. “It’s really a business trip,” she assured her mother. They were to be gone less than two weeks and traveling third-class.

  So, as Saint-Gaudens wrote, the “three red-heads” started on their way. (White, in addition to a thick, reddish-brown mustache, had close-cropped red hair that stood straight up as stiff as a brush. And though McKim had little hair left on top of his head, it, too, was red.) Their route was from Paris by train to Dijon, Beaune, and Lyon, then by boat from Lyon down the Rhône to Avignon, Arles, Saint-Gilles, and Nîmes; then back northward over the mountains by diligence to Langogne, Le Puy, and to Bourges, Tours, and Blois, then back to Paris by way of Orléans.

  In letters to his mother White described Dijon as clean and cheerful. Beaune, besides the beauty of the town itself, could be said to have “good wine and pretty women.” Most enjoyable was moving with the swift current of the Rhône. The boat was a side-wheel steamer with a single, tall stack and built on the lines of a canal boat. “[It] is 275 ft. long and not over 20 ft. wide, comme ça,” White wrote, and drew a sketch. “She holds about two hundred passengers. …”

  Avignon, with the remains of the ancient Pont d’Avignon and the enormous Palace of the Popes, both dating from feudal times, was much the most impressive spectacle on the river. Years later Saint-Gaudens would remember arriving at Avignon after nightfall, and as he walked the narrow streets, hearing “the sound of a Beethoven sonata floating from an open window into the warm summer night. …”

  Stanford White thought the portal of the twelfth-century Church of Saint-Gilles “the best piece of architecture in France.” It was later to be the inspiration for a porch he designed for St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York.

  At Nîmes they visited the great Roman amphitheater with its seating capacity of 20,000. “We sat on the top row and imagined ourselves ancient Romans,” White wrote. While Saint-Gaudens and McKim stayed seated where they were, White went down and rushed out into the arena, “struck an attitude and commenced declaiming” for their benefit. Warming to the role, he began stabbing imaginary gladiators until a guard appeared and chased him off.

  After Nîmes, they set off by diligence over the mountains to Le Puy, the highest town in France, at 4,000 feet, then on into Burgundy and the Loire Valley. By August 13, they were back in Paris. Gus felt they had learned even more by traveling third-class than from the architecture they had seen.

  To commemorate the fellowship of the expedition, he made a mock-heroic Roman medallion six inches in diameter featuring in relief caricatures of each of the three. Mock-Latin tributes decorated the circumference. At the center was a large architect’s T-square at the base of which were inscribed the letters “KMA,” believed to have been an abbreviation for “Kiss My Ass.” Saint-Gaudens presented bronze reproductions to each of his two friends, and kept the third for himself.

  Gus had “a most successful trip,” Gussie reported to her mother. “He feels he has learned a great deal from his architect friends.”

  When Saint-Gaudens returned to work on the Farragut monument, White went with him to the studio to help with plans for the pedestal. For a while White stayed overnight at the apartment, until he found a place of his own. McKim lingered only a little while before returning to New York. Then White headed off again to see more of France, and returned bringing superb sketches he had done of landscapes, houses, street scenes, and cathedrals inside and out. Then it was back to work with Saint-Gaudens, their efforts marking the start of collaborations to come on some twenty projects.

  Gussie appears to have welcomed White’s presence. “He is one of the nicest fellows I have ever met and Aug says he is tremendously talented,” she told her mother. White, however, was of another mind about her.

  He loved being back in Paris, he wrote to his mother, “I hug S[ain]tGaudens like a bear every time I see him, and would his wife if she was pretty—but she ain’t—so I don’t.

  She is very kind, however, and asks me to dinner, mends my clothes, and does all manner of things. She is an animated clothes rack, slightly deaf—a double barreled Yankee, and [I] mean to that extent that no comparison w
ill suffice. Why fate should have ordained that such a man should be harnessed to such a woman, Heaven only knows. Nevertheless, she has been very kind to me, and I ought to be ashamed of myself for saying anything about her.

  He thought Gussie’s sister Genie far prettier.

  Gussie also showed uncommon patience about Gus heading off with White on social whirls. One night, with another gregarious American, William Bunce, they went to a masked ball at the Opera and, as she reported to her parents, did not come home until half-past six the next morning.

  “I have just taken this paper from Gussie as she has a headache, and I don’t think she should write any more,” Gus scrawled in his own hand. “I close this epistle and fill the page so that Gussie can’t put anything else in it.”

  “I am writing in the studio,” she began another letter. Aug was washing his hands in a pail of water and talking to a friend. White was tasting some bread for his lunch and she was seated at a table writing.

  The model has just come in the second day and has retired behind a curtain to get himself up in Farragut’s coat and fixings and presently will mount on the stand where Aug will go to work. He and Mr. White are still working on the pedestal. … There is to be a high circular stone seat so fashioned.

  Then she made a small diagram of the pedestal. “Please don’t say anything about this as yet, [as] it is by no means fully decided upon.”

  “Do you want to know how I pass my day?” White wrote to his mother. He was awakened at his lodgings by a servant at nine-thirty, then chose to stay in bed for another half-hour, until he headed out for breakfast at 3 rue Herschel—“and ring the doorbell five times, which is my private ring.”

  Coffee, eggs, and oatmeal being swallowed, we forthwith make our way to the studio, and both set to work at our respective businesses. Then comes lunch hour. This is a very simple matter for Saint-Gaudens, who partakes of an unappetizing lunch packed up by his femme. With me it is quite an event. I go and buy all my provisions and lunch like a Seigneur [a lord] on 20 cents. Something in this way: Pâté de foie gras; boned chicken, or sardines, 4 cts.; two petits pains, well toasted, 2 cts.; rhum pudding, 3 cts.; un petit fromage suisse, 5 cts. and about 5 cts. worth of wine. …

  Then we go to work again, and darkness—which comes here now at five o’clock—gives us a rest.

  Great as the demands of the work had become, Gus and Gussie were taking more time for some pleasure together, and with others. They dined out, attended an occasional social event, and went again to the opera.

  Gus loved the opera no less than ever. But he loved the theater still more. The drama of the stage, the techniques of stagecraft—costume, lighting, scenery—all appealed tremendously. He loved watching actors at work and imagining himself in their place. If he could be anything other than what he was, he liked to say, he would be an actor. “I am convinced,” he later wrote, “that if I would overcome the sense of [self-] consciousness, I should be a wonderful actor.” And if not an actor, then a playwright, which might be better still, he thought. “How wonderful,” he would say, “to create characters to portray every phase of emotion, present all points of view, and with these characters work out their destinies.”

  I think anything and everything. This seeing a subject so that I can take either side with sympathy and conviction I sometimes think is a weakness. Then again I’m thinking it’s a strength. I could put it to good use as a dramatist.

  With her trouble hearing and her inadequate French, Gussie found the Paris theater extremely difficult to follow, and so seldom went with him. But she seems to have had a particularly good time at one evening affair put on by George and Louisa Healy. “We went to a dancing party at Mr. Healy’s and really enjoyed it very much,” she reported to her mother.

  How often Gus and Healy saw each other, or what they may have talked about, is regrettably unrecorded. Certainly they had much in common. But whether they ever compared notes on their modest beginnings in Boston and New York, or their early student years in Paris, or the Civil War and its heroes, is impossible to know.

  On her growing enjoyment of Paris, Gussie was explicit: “Every time I go out I like it better and better.”

  In addition to the Healys, they were meeting other noted Americans, among them Phillips Brooks, the minister of Trinity Church in Boston, and Mark Twain, who had returned to Paris with his wife. Twain would be remembered at one after-dinner gathering at 3 rue Herschel consuming one black cigar after another until he finally asked, “What is Art?” which was the signal for all to go home. Gus never liked to “talk art” and hated art theory.

  Art students like Carroll Beckwith and John Sargent were regularly in and out of the apartment and the studio. The studio the two young painters shared was on the same street as Gus’s, at 73 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. A few old friends from Gus’s own student days, like Alfred Garnier and Paul Bion, also made appearances.

  Gus took great interest in students and was unusually generous with his encouragement of those he thought promising. But beyond that, as Will Low would write, he had a manner of expressing himself, “of making one ‘see things,’ ” that they long remembered.

  He, in all simplicity, believed himself to be virtually inarticulate [Low wrote]; and for any personal exercise of the spoken or written word he quite honestly professed much the same aversion as he, the skilled artist, would feel for the bungling attempt of the ignorant amateur.

  But it was precisely because he was so intensely an artist that his mental vision was clear, and that which he saw he in turn made visible—there is no other word—to others.

  Sargent particularly impressed Saint-Gaudens. Further, he liked the young man. They exchanged work—Sargent gave Saint-Gaudens one of his watercolors; Saint-Gaudens fashioned a small medallion, a sketch in relief of Sargent in profile, which he gave to him. It was the start of a long stretch of mutual admiration.

  Still, the struggle to “break away” with the Farragut and achieve something beyond the ordinary continued, and grew increasingly difficult as Saint-Gaudens became ever more demanding of himself. His Civil War memories from boyhood were strong within him—of watching from the cameo cutter’s window as the New England volunteers came marching down Broadway singing “John Brown’s Body,” of seeing Lincoln and Grant in person, and the wounded back from the battlefields. “I have such respect and admiration for the heroes of the Civil War,” he had written earlier, “that I consider it my duty to help in any way to commemorate them in a noble and dignified fashion worthy of their great service.”

  New York was still, and always, home to Saint-Gaudens, and the Farragut, he knew, was to be New York’s first monument to the Civil War.

  In late March he was suddenly stricken with violent intestinal pains and a high fever. “It was all Mr. White, Louis, and I could do to take care of him night and day,” Gussie wrote. Days passed before he felt strong enough to walk slowly beside her in the Luxembourg Gardens, and weeks went by before he was able to resume work. Feelings of depression—the “triste undertone” of his soul, as he called it—set in. Worst was the awful sense of time a-wasting. “You have no idea how hard it is for him to remain inactive when there is so much waiting for him to do,” Gussie told her father.

  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 he
art 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.”