The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (70 page)

November 14: The Farragut statue looks much finer to us in the big than it did in the life-size one. If necessary it could be cast now, but Aug will probably work over it off and on for two months before having it cast.

The “fussing” went on, and on. He seemed never quite satisfied with what he had done. He hated to let his work go.

Gussie had been assigned to making the braid on the sleeve of “our Farragut.” It was a “purely mechanical thing … but it takes ever so much time. …”

But life was not all work. Gus had acquired a flute and she a piano on which to accompany him. Rental for both, she assured her parents, was only three dollars a month.

Sometimes he would scratch in a few good-spirited lines of his own at the end of her letters, or add a cartoon or caricature of himself, his head with the beard drawn the shape of a wedge, his long nose a straight line down from the forehead, his eyes two tiny dots.

Through the whole slow, drawn-out process, the great volume of clay had to be kept constantly moist on the surface. If it were allowed to dry out, the statue would crack. In December came the coldest winter since the year of the siege, with snows in Paris over a foot deep. The Seine froze over, and the worry inside the studio was that the wet clay might freeze and the statue crack. Two large coal stoves had to be kept burning, the temperature in the room and the surface of the clay carefully monitored day and night. “Poor Aug is driven, he does not know which way to turn and the days are so short and dark he can seem to accomplish very little in them,” wrote Gussie. “Louis sleeps there, and keeps the fires up all the time,” she reported a week later.

Writing to Richard Gilder on December 29, 1879, Gus said, “All my
brain can conceive now is arms with braid, legs, coats, eagles, caps, legs, arms, hands, caps, eagles, eagles, caps, and so on; nothing, nothing but that statue.”

In a letter to La Farge written the same day, he confided, “I haven’t the faintest idea of the merit of what I’ve produced. At times I think it good, then indifferent, then bad.”

By the last week of January 1880, the work in clay was nearly done to the satisfaction of the sculptor—all but for one troublesome leg. “One of Farragut’s legs has always bothered him and I am afraid he has used a great many swear words about it,” Gussie said, “but yesterday for the first time he got the leg and trousers to suit him and when I went up to the studio he was singing, so I knew that he was very happy about something. …”

The admiral stood eight feet, three inches tall, his legs apart, the left leg (the one giving the most trouble) slightly back from the right, the toes of the great fourteen-inch-long shoes pointed nearly straight ahead. The sword hanging from his left side and the fieldglasses grasped in the large left hand were also of heroic proportions.

He stood as if on deck at sea braced for whatever was to come, chin up, eyes straight ahead. The flap of his long double-breasted coat seemed truly to blow open with the wind, and the back of the coat, too, billowed out. And while due attention was paid to the braid on the sleeves, the buttons, belt, and straps that held the sword, there was an overall, prevailing simplicity that conveyed great inner strength, no less than the presence of an actual mortal being, for all the figure’s immense size. The admiral had missed buttoning the third button on his coat, for example.

The intent, weather-beaten face said the most. The look on the face, like the latent power in the stance, leaving no doubt that this was a man in command.

Casting the statue in plaster was scheduled to begin on Monday, February 9. “There are nineteen great bags of plaster here,” Gussie reported from the studio, “and any quantity of bars of iron and they will all go into the statue. They will be four days making the mold and then … the plaster statue will be cast.”

Once that cast was finished, Gus went to work again, and when done, “thought better of it,” as he reported to Stanford White.

A few writers for newspapers were permitted to come in and take a look, with the understanding that nothing was to be said in print until the statue was finished.

“I have seen nothing finer of its kind, even in France,” the correspondent for the
New York World
wrote at once. “The statue is admirably naturalistic in the best sense. It does not seem like a man of clay, but like a man of flesh and blood.” It was a first rave review, but Gus was furious that anything at all had been published at this stage.

Only days later, with all ready for the next step, there was an accident. In the process of getting the statue free from the scaffolding, it slipped and landed hard, cracking one of the troublesome legs. Twenty men had been helping with ropes and rollers. No one seemed at fault. “It was immensely heavy,” Gussie explained in a letter. Saint-Gaudens and others at once went to work, and the damage was repaired. To the delight of everyone, the weather was suddenly like summer, Gussie wrote. “Clear and cloudless and everything growing green. … Every window … open wide all day long. … There is nothing like Paris in spring.” Aug was “very well and very happy over his statue. …”

In April, Gussie discovered she was pregnant and wrote to tell her mother that her sickness each morning passed quickly and that immediately afterward her appetite returned better than ever.

Gus decided to submit a plaster Farragut, along with five of his basreliefs, to the Paris Salon. For a brief time, before being placed on exhibition inside, the statue stood out in the open air, as Gus had never seen it until then. “He felt very much pleased,” Gussie wrote, “and says he knows now that he has done a good thing. …”

His entries were awarded an Honorable Mention, and the Farragut received especially strong praise from French critics. Saint-Gaudens had captured “that initiative and boldness which Americans possess and which Farragut exemplified,” wrote Émile Michel in
Revue des Deux
Mondes.
The statue, said Paul Leroi in
L’Art
, was “the incarnation of the sailor, better cannot be done.”

By the middle of May the plaster statue was ready to be moved to the long-established Gruet Foundry, there to be cast in bronze. It was not only essential that such a foundry be experienced, Saint-Gaudens insisted, but that he be on hand to supervise the entire process. The cost was substantial, $1,200, as Gussie wrote to her parents. She was going with him to the foundry to watch. “You know it is quite an exciting thing. …”

Taking part in the whole process day after day at the foundry, Saint-Gaudens became a nervous wreck. Two weeks later, when the lower half of the statue was cast, again something went wrong and it had to be done all over, and again at considerable expense.

When at last the whole cast was done, the statue complete in bronze, its entire outer surface had to be expertly finished, and, as Saint-Gaudens wanted, with the admiral’s buttons and insignia given a slightly brighter gloss.

Finally the completed work—eight feet, three inches in length and weighing nine hundred pounds—had to be carefully packed up, shipped by rail to Le Havre and sent on its way aboard ship to New York. It was the largest work of sculpture in bronze by an American ever shipped from France until then.

Not until midsummer was everything sufficiently in order for Gus and Gussie themselves to leave for home.

The baby, a boy, was born in Roxbury on September 29, and christened Homer after his maternal grandfather. Through the months that followed, while Gussie and the infant remained with her family, Saint-Gaudens was busy finding a studio in New York and concentrating on work on the Farragut pedestal.

As finally resolved with White, and after much wrangling with the commission over the costs involved, the pedestal would place the statue fully nine feet above ground level and include tall, slightly curved stone
façades reaching out to either side, these to provide a comfortable place to sit—an exedra, as it was known—as well as space for the two large allegorical figures in relief representing Loyalty and Courage, combined with a motif of fish and waves at sea. This entire composition was being done in Hudson River blue stone, with the thought that its color would add further to the nautical theme. A lettered tribute to the admiral was also to be included, this composed by White’s father.

The relief figures of Loyalty and Courage were a major work unto themselves, and here again Louis Saint-Gaudens took part. They were to be seated figures and as large in scale as Farragut, their arms reaching out three feet. They were beautiful and unadorned, with the look of twin sisters, though the expression on the face of Courage was a touch more resolute and she wore breast armor, while Loyalty was partly bare-breasted. It was to be a pedestal unlike any ever seen in New York or anywhere else in the United States.

“Yesterday I had a good long day’s work, also today—I expect that in about two weeks to have both Loyalty and Courage finished,” Saint-Gaudens wrote in high spirits to Gussie, “Darling ole smuche,” in an undated letter from New York. “They have commenced cutting the fishes and they look very fine. The piece of blue stone that goes directly under the Farragut is the largest piece of blue stone ever quarried.”

“Did I ever tell you what a lot of handsome females there are here,” he kidded her, “a great many more than in France and all of them have a rare thing, fine breasts.” Who posed for Loyalty and Courage is not known.

How was the “Babby,” he asked at the end. “Is he President yet?”

The grand unveiling took place at Madison Square on the afternoon of May 25, 1881.

A Marine band played; sailors marched. The celebrated New York attorney and orator Joseph H. Choate delivered an extended tribute to the admiral, and 10,000 people stood in the hot sun through the length of it.

Seated on the speakers’ platform, along with some forty-five “notables”—including Mrs. Farragut, the mayor, the governor, church pastors, admirals, generals, and commissioners—could be seen the sculptor
Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his wife. It was his first experience with public acclaim, and happening in his own hometown.

The monument was a stunning success. The critics were exuberant, the whole art world electrified. The
New York Times
hailed the Farragut with the headlines:
A BEAUTIFUL AND REMARKABLE WORK OF ART,
and
MR. SAINT-GAUDENS’S TRIUMPH
.

It is Farragut just as he looked, quiet, unpretending, stern, resolved to do his duty. The heroic is not obtruded. … For the great point of this statue is the absence of “fuss and feathers” in the attitude as well as the dress. It would be commonplace, if it were not so simple and true.

The two bas-relief figures of Loyalty and Courage ought to be ranked among the finest achievements of sculpture in America, the
Times
continued. “The faces are naturally … and most carefully worked. Here a weak man would fail.”