When Henry Adams returned to Washington in October 1886 following his trip to Japan, he found his season of death extended. Upon arrival he learned of the passing of his brother-in-law Ephraim Gurney, another “savage blow.”1 A month later, Adams’s father succumbed at age seventy-nine, ending several years of mental decline, and Henry took on the added responsibility of caring for his frail mother for the final three summers of her life. “During the last eighteen months I have not had the good luck to attend my own funeral, but with that exception have buried pretty nearly everything I lived for,” he wrote a friend.2 These losses and his duties in providing a suitable cemetery monument for his father in Quincy, Massachusetts, turned his thoughts increasingly to the need to memorialize his wife as he marked the first anniversary of her death. At age forty-nine, Adams was aware that her Washington, D.C., gravesite would also become his tomb one day, an indicator of status and public memory for his prestigious family as well as a vehicle for personal catharsis.3 Having become a widower early, he had the opportunity to face these difficult issues in his prime, and he would take a strong personal role in conceiving the essential idea behind the Rock Creek Cemetery monument.
With the encouragement of his friend John La Farge and the support of Clover’s relatives, Adams commissioned thirty-eight-year-old Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Figure 27), who was fast becoming one of the most important American sculptors of his time, to make the bronze grave figure.4 The Irish-born, French-trained Saint-Gaudens already had reinterpreted two genres of sculpture, the war memorial and bas-relief portrait, in America. He had catapulted to public fame with his bold Farragut Memorial, unveiled in 1881 in New York City. His Standing Lincoln for Chicago was about to be dedicated, and he had garnered a major commission in 1882 for another Civil War monument in Boston honoring Clover’s cousin Robert Gould Shaw and the black regiment Shaw led. These public monuments featured naturalistic bronze figures within an innovative architectural environment, at times combined with allegorical attendants of almost supernatural force. On a more intimate level, Saint-Gaudens’s delicate bas-relief portraits of members of his artistic circle and the literary, social, and economic elite, sometimes made as gifts, were highly prized, showing his subjects to be self-confident, at peace with themselves, and secure in their lives. “They are … refined and artistic. They are what one wants to be,” Adams said of the small portraits, mostly made in bronze.5 Each of Saint-Gaudens’s subjects appears locked in an expressionless reverie (and usually in profile), disconnected from us, yet honorable and innocent. The young sculptor gained a reputation as sensitive to the wishes of his patrons, whose likenesses he gently improved, while refusing to betray his own standards of perfectionism inspired by Italian Renaissance bas-reliefs. At times he offered choices to his clients, involving them in the creative process while subtly directing their taste.
Figure 27.
Kenyon Cox, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1887, replica 1908. Oil on canvas, 33 1/2 × 47 1/8 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of friends of the artist, through August Jaccaci. Image © the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In the realm of cemetery sculpture, artists’ skills, motivations, and relationships with patrons varied greatly. Artisans, trained in an apprentice system and often working directly with stone quarries, had been responsible for many tombstones in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century. But funerary commissions late in the century offered a new generation of Beaux-Arts-trained sculptors an opportunity to make “ideal” or imaginative work, leaving behind the steady stream of portrait orders that were the staple of their oeuvres, even for artists like Saint-Gaudens. The relationship that evolved in the creation of a grave memorial could be a personal, even emotional one: Adams’s expectations for his sculpture led to high hopes followed by periods of deep bitterness and, in the end, profound personal gratitude. Daniel Chester French’s relationship with the Milmore family and the judge-executor of the Milmore brothers’ wills was less close, a professional service negotiated with the aid of a lawyer. Frank Duveneck and William Wetmore Story faced the challenge of executing their own memorials for their lost wives.
Over the decades, Saint-Gaudens’s sculptures were often described as “noble” and “beautiful”—yet embodying a “penetrating vision.”6 Saint-Gaudens himself seemed to elicit a protective sense of loyalty and reverence among acquaintances, patrons, and assistants, who saw him as an individual touched by a unique talent and guided by intuition: a meticulous perfectionist who was a warm, humorous, and generous man, yet also a vulnerable, reticent personality, who was at times nervous, introverted, and quick to outbursts, suffering periods of depression. Women wanted to care for him (and he maintained a mistress, Davida Clark, and illegitimate child, Louis); male friends found him a hearty companion who loved musical evenings and ribald humor. As his success grew, he sometimes made patrons uneasy, however, because he juggled a number of projects at once and insisted on not rushing the final result, creating notoriously lengthy waits for his attention.
Saint-Gaudens had learned to work hard during his early years in a humble immigrant family in lower Manhattan. As a child, he delivered shoes for his father, whose handmade French styles attracted New York’s well-to-do; perhaps these kinds of tasks began to shape “Gus’s” deferential, boyish charm. He left school at age thirteen to apprentice with a cameo maker, and then another, and supported himself by the tedious labor involved in making cameos for brooches, bracelets, and necklaces for many years, even after his parents sent him abroad in 1867. Aided by his fluency in French (originally of a curious Gascon variety, which he learned from his Pyreneen-born father) and the night-school art classes he had taken in New York, he became one of the earliest American students to win admission to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He witnessed firsthand the displays of contemporary European art at the 1867 Paris Exposition, including work by such “neo-Florentine” French artists as Paul Dubois, who won his admiration. But at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 he went to Rome until 1875, and it was there that he launched his career as a sculptor and met his future wife and first significant patrons. Back in New York, he furthered friendships with other creative individuals like architect Stanford White and editor Richard Watson Gilder, engaging in a genteel bohemianism of studio visits and concerts. In 1877 he married Augusta Homer, an art student from Roxbury, Massachusetts, and took his bride to Paris for three years, where he labored on the Farragut Memorial that led to his first great success.
Henry Adams’s brother Charles later described his surprise on meeting the by-then venerated Saint-Gaudens to discover how rumpled and ordinary he looked (“I should have taken him for the foreman of a mechanical concern”), and how his talk was “decidedly American and unaffected,” lacking any pretence.7 Saint-Gaudens was of medium height but attractive, with thick, reddish brown hair, piercing blue eyes beneath bushy brows, and a sensuous mouth. Biographer Charles Lewis Hind called his a “strong, beautiful face.”8 The sculptor caricatured his own long, straight “Greek” nose, square forehead, wavy hair, and generous ears in self-portrait sketches he included in letters to friends, and he usually drew a halo over his head as well, since his name was “Saint.” Saint-Gaudens joked too about the “Assyrian” beard he affected in the mid-1880s, squared at the front. Fellow artist Kenyon Cox chose to paint the sculptor in profile to accentuate these features and gave him a genteel demeanor. Photographs often highlight his large hands, and some portray him in his work clothes, soiled by plaster dust, the marks of the sculptor’s studio, but most photos as the years passed show him in tweedy suits, the peer of his upper-crust clients, comfortable in the world of artists, writers, and cultural achievers in which he circulated. His strong features gave his face an increasingly craggy appearance as he aged. All of these qualities helped him to become ultimately, in one commentator’s words, a “confidante of the powerful, and arbiter of taste for a generation of American sculptors who were his pupils.”9 Endlessly encountering financial concerns, Saint-Gaudens seemed to lack business acumen, however, floating in some “higher” realm, and he often seemed to depend on colleagues like White or his wife, Augusta, to look out for his diplomatic or financial needs. While thoroughly cosmopolitan in the increasingly global late nineteenth century, by all accounts he was no intellectual; he did not read a great deal until later in life, and he was often uncomfortable articulating his self-reflections.
Adams’s relationship with Saint-Gaudens suggested one model for the Gilded Age patron of funerary art. Unlike the process for many public sculpture commissions, competitions were not held nor were public notices posted about desired projects for private cemetery memorials. The sculptor worked directly with the family of the deceased or a designated intermediary. For Adams it was a highly personal and private matter. His diary indicates that he spent time with Saint-Gaudens in June 1886 just before his trip to Japan, a little more than six months after Clover’s death. He ultimately came to see Saint-Gaudens as a special emotional vehicle, a medium or instrument to make concrete and visible his longings for resolution—not just a technician or craftsman contracted to execute a monument, but someone with an innate sensibility or gift. Adams felt that he as patron should provide the core concept for a memorial, and the sculptor, with his special abilities for felt expression, should actualize it in durable physical form.10 Adams, whose life had been reconfigured by loss, gained consolation from playing a personal role in the creative project, his participation at times becoming a form of therapy. For his part, Saint-Gaudens needed to gain deep intuitive understanding of the patron’s feelings and goals in order to convey them. The creative process thus involved multiple face-to-face meetings, with appropriate performances of respect and sympathy by the artist, and numerous written exchanges, although Adams controlled tightly his own availability for these encounters and eventually withdrew.11 The sculptor was required to perform what sociologist Arlie Hochschild has termed “emotional labor,” a kind of labor increasingly common in modern life in which outsiders were paid to take on duties such as undertaking, nursing, or hospitality services once conducted by family members or personal acquaintances. In this work demeanor is an essential part of the product, involving what Hochschild calls “deep acting”; the worker expends his emotional self to promote reciprocal feelings, a desired state in the client.12 Thus Saint-Gaudens might have told Adams (like other male friends, he addressed him as “Adams”) with deep sympathy about his feelings after his own mother’s death in 1875. “There is always the ‘triste’ undertone in my soul that comes from my sweet Irish mother” (Mary McGuiness Saint-Gaudens), the sculptor’s son later recalled Saint-Gaudens as saying. In a sympathy letter written to Richard Watson Gilder in 1885 after the death of Gilder’s mother, Saint-Gaudens wrote, “I have gone through the same grief you are having; and … at times it seemed as if I could not bear it.… [T]he trial has been like a great fire that has passed, and it seems, after all these years, as the one holy spot in my life, my sweet mother. I am with you in your grief, believe me.” Saint-Gaudens’s son, Homer, recalls him sobbing in his studio on the night his father died.13
Emotional workers may eventually begin to interiorize the beliefs they act out so as not to feel that they are acting in an inauthentic way; their labor in producing affective experience can be draining. Saint-Gaudens commented on his wavering empathy for clients in his partially completed autobiography, saying that he had an ability to see things from multiple perspectives. “This seeing a subject so that I can take either side with equal sympathy and equal conviction I sometimes think a weakness. Then again I’m thinking it a strength.”14 “I’m convinced that, if I would overcome the sense of consciousness, I should be a wonderful actor.”15
Adams hoped for an empathic worker who could carry out with mind and hands something higher than he could imagine, yet be guided by his desires, creating an object whose success he ultimately had the special intelligence and heart to recognize. Saint-Gaudens appeared to be deferential, listening attentively in discussions, but his Beaux-Arts training, his obsession with the process of creation, also gave him his own stubborn agenda. He insisted on a long period of gestation and development that allowed him to put his personal stamp on his sculpture. “I make seventeen models for each statue I create,” he once said. “It’s the brain work not the finger work that takes the time.”16 This slow progress led Adams to worry that his project would never be completed, and that it would not ultimately be the Asian-influenced “Budha” that he envisioned, embodying ideas of ambivalence and multiplicity. It was clear that Saint-Gaudens, this mix of immigrant street urchin and cosmopolitan artist, ultimately inscribed some of his own aesthetic concerns in the resulting memorial. His deference was in part authentic, and in part a performance of the artist’s required role in a commission resulting from personal loss and heartbreak.17
The 1880s was a period of “statumania” in which American sculptors who had trained abroad (or immigrant sculptors settling in this country) found their skills in considerable demand. While the Civil War provided a major theme of public monuments, the cemetery also became a site of renewed aesthetic consideration. Saint-Gaudens had never shied away from the genre of funerary sculpture, collaborating with La Farge on some of his earliest gravestone and church decorations, which he completed in France. “When I first met Saint-Gaudens … he was carving tombstones in Paris,” Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, commented years later, suggesting the lowly nature of cemetery ornamentation in an American sculptor’s repertoire in that earlier era.18
But Saint-Gaudens and La Farge were familiar with the greater importance accorded funerary art in Europe, especially in France, where sculpture for such cemeteries as Père Lachaise and Montmartre in Paris was regularly exhibited at the fine-arts salon. During his later career, Saint-Gaudens actively sought reform of American cemetery aesthetics. A studio photo (Figure 28) from the 1870s shows his early work in three genres: a bust of Farragut for his large-scale public memorial, a bas-relief portrait of a woman, and a cross he designed for the family tomb of Edward King, the largest landowner in Newport, Rhode Island. In this picture capturing his achievements, Saint-Gaudens did not flinch from showing the graveyard cross as the equal of his other work. Over the course of his career he would make nearly a dozen sculptures or reliefs for cemeteries.
Figure 28.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Bust of Admiral Farragut, bas-relief of Leonie Marguerite Le Noble, and King tomb cross in the artist’s Rome studio, 1877–78. Plaster. Papers of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.
La Farge had steered other patrons such as Cornelius Vanderbilt II to Saint-Gaudens for portraits of family members and decorative work, prime commissions in this era of Gilded Age fortunes and palatial houses built by the new industrialist millionaires. And it was likely La Farge who persuaded Adams to retain the sculptor for his project, a conspicuous high-style monument that would cost far more than any standard cemetery artisan’s work. La Farge, via his acquaintance with both men, performed the role of facilitator and intermediary over time. Adams’s comments indicate that he was deeply influenced by his old friend’s ideas. These included La Farge’s investigations into an art of mystical ambiguity that can promote a gentle reverie of mind and spirit, and his related interest in an experiential form of art that required the discrimination and vision of the spectator to complete its meaning.
La Farge had a number of friends (such as geologist Clarence King) in common with Adams, moving in an overlapping international, cosmopolitan social circle. The painter and Saint-Gaudens also had many things in common: both were bilingual and had been raised in Catholic immigrant households in lower Manhattan, for example. La Farge’s parents were much more prosperous and cultivated than Saint-Gaudens’s shoemaker father, however, and he had completed a college education. It is possible that Adams might have seen the faint aura of French Catholicism that the two artists shared as an onramp to a special relationship with mysticism missing from his own New England Congregational/Unitarian upbringing. La Farge, who was much older than his protégé, had overseen the execution of major decorative projects, and he had retained Saint-Gaudens on several of these in the 1870s, including Trinity Church in Boston, St. Thomas Church in New York, and the King tomb in Rhode Island.19 Balding and bespectacled with a wispy mustache over his small pursed mouth, La Farge loved to puff on cigars and maintained an almost oriental demeanor in the paintings and photographs that survive, including an early self-portrait of the lean, six-foot-tall artist wearing a wide-brimmed black hat and carrying a walking stick on a path leading into an unknown distance (Figure 29), a metaphor for his life. He had followed a partially self-guided course of artistic training and experimentation in Boston and abroad, consistently drawn to the problem of how one communicates a sense of musing or abstracted daydream, inspired by an artifact—the sense that an object held, and could share, an essential secret. Curator Henry Duffy has noted that La Farge introduced Saint-Gaudens to a new concept of art based on his personal reworking of medieval and Asian design mixed with the Arts and Crafts style of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. Saint-Gaudens wrote in his memoirs, “There is no doubt that my intimacy with La Farge had been a spur to higher endeavor, equal to, if not greater than any other I have received from outside sources.”20
Figure 29.
John La Farge, Portrait of the Painter, 1859. Oil on wood panel, 16 1/16 × 11 1/2 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Samuel D. Lee Fund. Image © the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
All of these men, Adams and La Farge as well as Stanford White, who worked with Saint-Gaudens, understood the consequences of installing an object of moving beauty in the cemetery, and they shared a desire to avoid the mawkishly sentimental, merely pretty, or overly melodramatic. The artists understood Adams’s desire to use the monument and the evocative questions it would pose to counter any sense of shame or guilt that arose from Clover’s suicide and the ensuing scandal. Beauty could serve a palliative function, perhaps easing pain, but it could also be equated to something that was good and true, with a moral life and outlook. It could cloak or assist in denying ugly truths. Ideally, it could be a means to transform, address, or mask the unspeakable, the trauma subject beyond the scope of normal language. The goal was to turn a tragedy into poetry, to counterbalance the horrific and convert a sense of grief to one of awe or wonder, something positive that awaited in a realm beyond grief. It would distract from the reality of Clover’s corpse lying beneath the ground a few steps away, its brutal degradation and stench thankfully covered by the earth.
By providing this bridge between pain and beauty, a memorial sculpture, it was hoped, could suggest some sort of elevating truth and give insightful visitors a sense that through it they had glimpsed a secret connection to the larger cosmic realm outside daily life—perhaps, for some viewers, to God—aiding them on a path to greater self-reflection. As French philosopher Victor Cousin said in his book The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, beauty “is a noble ally of the moral and religious sentiments; it awakens, preserves, and develops them.… So art, which is founded on this sentiment … is naturally associated with all that ennobles the soul.”21 A material impression that reaches us through our eye, or through a combination of the senses, was thought to trigger profound thought and introspection. Artists like Saint-Gaudens surely considered ways in which beauty, created through combinations of symmetry, curving contours, and color, could manipulate emotions and also temporarily displace certain feelings that survivors did not wish to acknowledge—be they a grief too deep to speak of, anger, relief that the burden of a sick soul had ended, or guilt at their own triumphant survival. In a way the monument offered Adams, who had refused all words about his wife’s death, a means to break the silence, to speak his piece and rewrite history, claiming a grace and nobility for his wife’s life through the visual while attempting to repress other subtexts, the unwanted emotions that kept resurfacing.
Adams was no doubt aware of the great tragedy that Saint-Gaudens had experienced in 1884, when fire destroyed a choir of three angelic marble figures, each nine feet tall, being prepared to stand atop the mausoleum of Edwin D. Morgan in Hartford, Connecticut. Morgan (1811–1883) had been among Saint-Gaudens’s early patrons, having commissioned a marble version of his Hiawatha and also advocated for the young sculptor’s selection to design the Farragut Memorial; thus, Saint-Gaudens considered this sculptural group to be another critical commission. Morgan, governor of New York State during the Civil War and briefly a U.S. senator, was also a Protestant religious philanthropist, who had given at least $750,000 to Union Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian institution, in New York for religious training. His fortune was estimated at nearly $10 million. He and his wife, Eliza Waterman (a first cousin), had suffered greatly in other ways, however. Only one of their five children lived to adulthood, and that son, Edwin II, died in 1881 before his parents. Having grown up and begun his political career in Connecticut, Morgan decided in 1868 to buy one of the finest lots high up in the new Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford. Cedar Hill was one of the new cemeteries, consecrated only that year, built in the wake of the rural cemetery movement but representing new advances in landscape design. Designer Jacob Weidemann, who later wrote a book about his ideas, put more emphasis, for instance, on creating unbroken vistas, with fewer hedges and boundaries, in a curving landscape. Unusual was a sixty-five-acre area of landscape and ponds but no graves, known as an ornamental foreground, which visitors must cross before coming to the first gravesites. A chapel at the entrance was being constructed at the same time as the angels. Many of Hartford’s wealthiest citizens would be buried there beneath big, expensive monuments.
Saint-Gaudens was not a churchgoing man in his adult life and held no professed religious beliefs, but he willingly made religious figures when asked to do so. He reportedly made (at top speed) an angel a day for the large bas-relief he completed at St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church in New York.22 As early as 1875, Governor Morgan was in discussions with Saint-Gaudens and White for a twenty-five-foot-high cross and a ring of eight nine-foot angels to surmount his planned mausoleum at Cedar Hill. The project as originally envisioned would have been a sensation, more than thirty-five feet high in all. There was almost nothing like it in America unless you consider a monument like Abraham Lincoln’s huge, wholly secular tomb, completed in 1874 in a Springfield, Illinois, cemetery, with bronze sculpture by Larkin Mead. Saint-Gaudens and White quickly settled on the reduced plan for three angels to stand atop the mausoleum under a colossal cross, since Morgan declined to spend more than $20,000 (the same cost, ultimately, as the Adams Memorial), and the commission for the Morgan angels was finally awarded in early 1878. In the final design the central angel, distinctive for its swaying posture and costume, with a low-slung floral belt and floral hair decoration, held a musical scroll (Figure 30). Two flanking angels played stringed instruments, singing of their joy about the Resurrection, according to surviving correspondence. White counseled Saint-Gaudens to make his figures severe rather than pretty or sentimental, and the result was dignified and androgynous. According to a description by White, the angels were all chanting “Gloria in Excelsis Deo,” a hymn of praise. They were to stand before a tree of life that sprang from the cross, its leaves creating a natural aureole over their heads (eliminating any need for halos, which Saint-Gaudens feared were too much associated with Catholicism). Saint-Gaudens, juggling other commissions, made Morgan wait for years until he finally selected and shipped two huge blocks of Carrara marble to the Hartford cemetery, where local stonecutters carved the angels and cross on site, using his plaster models as their guide. The stonecutters labored winter and summer for nearly two years, and Morgan died before seeing the project completed. Then in August 1884, “calamity” struck, when fire broke out in a temporary shed the marble carvers had built around the sculptures to protect them from the elements. The marbles were blackened and Saint-Gaudens declared the “utter ruin” of his angels after rushing to the graveyard in his horse-drawn carriage. Privately, he blamed a discontented former laborer. To his horror, the widowed Mrs. Morgan refused to restart the carving, and the sculptural project was abandoned.23
Figure 30.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, sketch for central angel for the Morgan Tomb, ca. 1879. Photo by George Collins Cox from the Photographic History Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
Over the years Saint-Gaudens put his Morgan tomb angels to good use, however, in other realms. He used similar figures, without wings, for the red marble caryatids holding up a mosaic fireplace mantel in the Cornelius Vanderbilt house in New York (1881–83), flanked by leaded-glass windows designed by La Farge. A winged marble figure for the tomb of Anna Maria Smith in Newport, Rhode Island, also emerged from the Morgan tomb project, later modified in bronze with a more wraithlike body, a belt and crown of passionflowers, and a raised tablet bearing the words “Amor Caritas,” his only work to be purchased by the French government. Other variations or reductions were completed over the years (Figure 31).24
Figure 31.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, ca. 1898, in his Paris studio with a variant of his Amor Caritas, prepared for the John Hudson Hall Memorial in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown, New York. U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire.
Before accepting the Adams Memorial commission, Saint-Gaudens also worked on a bronze bas-relief for the Stewart Memorial in Brooklyn for the father of arts patron Isabella Stewart Gardner, another angelic theme. In 1887 he began conceiving of a bronze memorial featuring two praying women for the family cemetery lot of statesman Hamilton Fish in St. Philip’s Churchyard at Garrison, New York (Plate 7). Fish, a former secretary of state, U.S. senator, and governor of New York, had just lost his wife, Julia. He wanted a monument remembering her and their daughter Elizabeth d’Hauteville who had died in 1864. Thus in the final memorial, one woman is depicted as older, one younger—general likenesses of the mother and daughter based on photographs and miniatures supplied to the artist.25 Saint-Gaudens worked on this project on and off during much the same years as the Adams commission, taking so long to complete it that an aging Fish sent him pitiful pleas. Late in the process he surprised the patron by proposing that he set aside the kneeling figures he had designed and substitute standing sculptures. “In my researches … I have found that the gesture of prayer or adoration with the early Christians is a standing one, and very impressive with the costume I have,” he wrote; “so impressive that I am led to believe that I can go beyond what I have already accomplished.”26 Fish consented but kept pressing Saint-Gaudens to send the plaster figures to the foundry, fearing that otherwise he, like Morgan, would not live to see his monument completed. Writing in late August 1891 of his painful disappointment that they had yet to be cast, Fish, then eighty-three and ailing, expressed fear that with the winter season approaching the ground would be too hard to install the memorial and that “would throw me over to another season (if I am to be allowed to see another season).” The figures were finally realized in bronze in late October of that year.27
Henry Adams had carefully considered his goals for the gravesite in Rock Creek Cemetery. Because of the circumstances of Marian Adams’s life and death, some traditional options for memorializing a woman seemed unsuitable. The maternal instinct celebrated in many monuments for females was not appropriate, for Clover had been childless. Both she and Henry were religious skeptics, so the optimism of Protestant religious faith—crosses, angels, and Bible verses, which Edwin Morgan had insisted on and Hamilton Fish included—fell flat. Guided by La Farge, Adams would instead seek a newer conception of consolation that synthesized Western and Eastern tastes, the rational and nonrational, and ultimately male and female. He was attracted to the ideas of philosophical acceptance and centered wholeness contained in Buddhism, and to related imagery such as the seated Kwannon bodhisattva that had fascinated La Farge during their trip to Japan. He and La Farge thought these could be melded with the highest heritage of Western art, its classicizing themes of nobility and serenity.28
In the Washington, D.C., city directory, the section listing cemeteries began with the lines, “Side by side the high and low / And rich and poor shall equal lie.”29 It is evident that Adams also wished an assertion of high taste that would separate his monument from the democracy and often-discussed poor taste of the cemetery and its multitude of stock monuments.
