Creating the Memorial
Augustus Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin in 1848 and raised in New York, where he apprenticed as a cameo cutter at the age of thirteen. After a period of study in Paris in the 1860s, he began his career in Rome with several commissions for sculpted portraits. In post-Civil War America, Saint-Gaudens found a great demand for public sculpture to honor the nation's war dead. The Shaw Memorial, first intended as a traditional equestrian monument to one heroic figure, evolved into a more original and challenging project as the artist added a narrative relief to commemorate the troops as well as their leader. Although the artist's contract called for the work to be completed in two years, Saint-Gaudens took more than a decade to finish it.
Even before the bronze Shaw Memorial was unveiled on Boston Common in May 1897, Saint-Gaudens was refining its design in a plaster version. When this cast was exhibited in Paris in 1898, it showed slight changes from the original conception, and further changes when it was shown there again in 1900. In 1901, the plaster traveled to the Pan-American Exposition and was subsequently purchased by the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy. Acquired by the Saint-Gaudens Memorial, Cornish, N.H., where it was exhibited from 1959 to 1996. The site became Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, a unit of the National Park Service, in 1965. The cast has now come to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, on long-term loan.
