Commissions for funerary art were often so private, or sometimes so indifferent, that little correspondence about the creative process survives. The Adams Memorial, however, is one of the best-documented cemetery sculptures of its era. Letters written by Henry Adams, John La Farge, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Stanford White survive, and descriptions of the surrounding events were published, sounding the same basic themes though with some variance. It seems clear that the creative process began with a primitive stick-figure drawing, followed by small clay sketches, then the larger clay conception, worked out behind a screen in the sculptor’s New York studio; finally, a plaster version was prepared for casting in bronze. Saint-Gaudens’s method involved many rounds of trial efforts, destruction, and reworking, until he felt the whole had come together satisfactorily. It was a fluid process of experimenting and perfecting at a time when the sculptor was also managing a number of other major projects and duties such as teaching at the Art Students League. While Saint-Gaudens was conceiving the figure for Adams’s memorial, difficult negotiations continued between the patron and White about the architectural setting that shaped the visitors’ approach and overall experience.
The undated stick-figure drawing in Saint-Gaudens’s papers (Figure 32) appears to record one of the earliest conversations conveying Adams’s wishes. It shows a single seated figure, drawn with a few quick lines, below the words “Adam,” “Buhda,” and “Mental Repose” in Saint-Gaudens’s hand. Added to these is the scribbled phrase, “Calm reflection in contrast with Violence or force of nature,” hauntingly similar to Adams’s description of his feelings after the death of his sister Louisa. The single word “reflect” is repeated at the left.1 At the bottom of the same page the sculptor also drew two standing figures in a rectangle with the notation, “medallion with two people looking at something with back of one figure showing only.”2 But this latter idea of two selves separated by the veil of death appears to have been quickly discarded. It seems that a portrait statue was never considered.
Figure 32.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, initial drawing of concept for the Adams Memorial, ca. 1886–87. Augustus Saint-Gaudens Papers. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.
Clay maquettes were produced after Adams sent Saint-Gaudens photographs of Buddhist sculpture and figures by Michelangelo, suggesting his interest in a fusion of Eastern and Western aesthetics. Saint-Gaudens thanked Adams for the photos in a letter of September 11, 1887, saying they proved to be “pretty good food” for conceiving preliminary three-dimensional sketches. “I will be in New York after October 1st,” the sculptor added. “If you catch me in, I will show you the result of Michelangelo, Budha and St Gaudens.’ ”3 A few months later Stanford White, whose aid Saint-Gaudens had enlisted in the project, described seeing “very small and rough” preliminary sketches.4 These may have included the three clay reliefs (Figure 33) illustrated in The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a compilation of the sculptor’s recollections, edited and amplified by his son, Homer, in 1913. Homer, who in his writings provided one of the major surviving accounts of how the monument was conceived, said that Adams “did not cast his desires in any definite mold.” Instead, Adams suggested that Saint-Gaudens talk with La Farge, who understood his sympathy with Asian religious attitudes, and proposed that he “have about him such objects as photographs of Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. As the result of this advice … my father first sought to embody a philosophic calm, a peaceful acceptance of death and whatever lay in the future.”5 Homer said his father initially modeled a relief of Socrates for the Adams tomb. The Greek philosopher ended his life by drinking hemlock, and this sketch (at right, Figure 33) shows a bearded male figure in antique dress seated on a bench and holding a footed cup.
Figure 33.
“Three sketches of the Adams Monument, showing the original idea of Socrates.” Plate from Homer Saint-Gaudens, ed., The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (New York: Century Co., 1913), showing clay sketches made ca. 1888.
Immediately Stanford White, La Farge, and indeed all my father’s friends, took exception to the idea as painful for the reason of suicide, since Mrs. Adams too had died by her own hand. So he gave up the scheme and turned his attention to a number of large photographs and drawings of Buddhas.… From the conception of “Nirvana” so produced, his thought broadened out, becoming more inclusive and universal until he attempted the present figure, which he occasionally explained as both sexless and passionate, a figure for which sometimes a male model, Mr. John Flanagan, posed and sometimes a female one.6
The other two clay sketches reproduced in Reminiscences as well as several others that survive in the form of archival photos also portray single draped figures. One (at the center of Figure 33) appears to be female, with a piece of long, flowing drapery cloaking her head and reaching to her feet. Her arms are crossed and a flower—possibly a poppy, symbolizing sleep and death—appears to one side. She may be seated on a rock. The third sketch, the most similar in gesture to the final Adams Memorial, is of a heavily draped, seated figure with its proper left hand held beneath the figure’s chin. It has the simplest backing, a rectangular stele with a cornice marked off with two horizontal lines. The models suggest that a basic conception for experimentation was settled on quite early.
Saint-Gaudens and White frequently used antique and Renaissance sculpture as references for their work, and these initial sketches are compatible with ancient grave stele at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.7 They also were compatible with figures from the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, such as Jesse or the Sibyls. John Flanagan, who worked as a studio assistant to Saint-Gaudens at that time, recalled “that Mr. Adams brought to the studio several [Adolphe] Braun photographs of lunettes from this [Sistine Chapel] ceiling and I am quite certain that St Gaudens found the general arrangement of the drapery of the Nirvana in these figures.”8
The other major account of the origins of the Adams Memorial is a 1910 newspaper article based on an interview with La Farge. According to this article, Adams asked Saint-Gaudens if he could make a figure to symbolize “the acceptance, intellectually, of the inevitable.”
Saint-Gaudens immediately became interested, and made a gesture indicating the pose which Mr. Adams’ words had suggested to his mind. “No,” said Mr. Adams, “the way you’re doing that is a ‘Penseroso.’ ” Thereupon the sculptor made several other gestures until one of them struck Mr. Adams as corresponding with his idea.… Saint-Gaudens grabbed the Italian boy who was mixing clay, put him into the pose and draped a blanket over him.… “Now that’s done,” said Mr. Adams, “the pose is settled. Go to La Farge about any original ideas of Kwannon. I don’t want to see the statue till it’s finished.”9
According to this account, La Farge carried out his role by simply reading stories of the Kwannon, a Buddhist intermediary figure, to Saint-Gaudens.10
The sketches and surviving correspondence suggest that a relief sculpture was initially under consideration and that both of these published accounts compressed and simplified events that took place over a longer period of time amid negotiations in which photographs and plans were sent back and forth. In fact, the model may have been Flanagan, then twenty-two years old, for he recalled later that Saint-Gaudens “tried various arrangements of drapery on me—the material was Russian crape—and photographed them.”11
In suggesting sources such as Michelangelo and Buddhist sculptures, Adams was asking that the reference for the tomb be high art rather than stock Western cemetery styles. In saying that he did not want a “Penseroso” pose, Adams must have meant that he did not want a conventional, easily readable iconography. Americans of the mid-nineteenth century often associated that title with Milton’s poem “Il Penseroso,” describing the goddess of melancholy, which was the subject of numerous artworks.12
Saint-Gaudens enjoyed the opportunity to create a wholly imaginative sculpture, unlike his monuments to Civil War heroes, which usually combined physical likenesses and allegorical figures.13 On April 29, 1888, Adams wrote in his dairy, “Last Sunday I was in New York.… I saw La Farge and St Gaudens, and made another step in advance towards my Buddha grave. Nothing now remains but to begin work, and St Gaudens hopes to play with it as a pleasure while he labors over the coats and trowsers of statesmen and warriors.”14
Adams signed a contract with White by August 1888 for designing and supervising the stone work, but negotiations for a separate contract with Saint-Gaudens dragged on for several months, delayed by genteel sensitivities as each man tried to emphasize the creative and personal nature of the project. Both acted as though money dealings and deadlines were an unfortunate but necessary part of the process, yet a sculptor needed to be a businessman, covering the cost of materials and a team of assistants, and Adams worried about the injury to his personal wealth.15 The monument eventually cost him $20,000, to be paid in stages on completion of each step of the sculpture making, such as the full-size clay model, bronze casting, and the architectural setting. Saint-Gaudens’s contract said the sculptor “agrees to execute for Mr. Adams and place in position in Mr. Adam’s lot in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington D.C. a figure in bronze of heroic size … said figure to be similar in general disposition to a small rough sketch made by Mr. St Gaudens and approved by Mr. Adams.” He asked Adams to fill in the name of the cemetery and date of completion, “say the Autumn of /89 if that suits you. I expect to have it done before then.”16 But the project was not to be finished until 1891.
As the third “haunting anniversary” of his wife’s December death passed, a restless Adams went to New York on December 9, 1888, to visit Saint-Gaudens, “who has begun the Buddha [triggering a payment]. We discussed the scale, and I came away telling him that I did not think it wise for me to see it again, in which he acquiesced.”17 Whether or not Adams was disingenuous, he later was credited, by this withdrawal, with giving Saint-Gaudens the artistic freedom to create a masterwork. He stated, however, that he did so out of fearfulness rather than trust; at this point when there was no turning back, he worried that Saint-Gaudens, steeped in Beaux-Arts and classical training, was not up to the task of comprehending Asian philosophy as he wished. The sculptor, who had asked Adams if he could recommend “any book not long that you think might assist me in grasping the situation any,” met with La Farge at Adams’s suggestion and reported that “in an hour I got all I wished from him as you predicted.”18 Saint-Gaudens then entered a long period of reconsideration and deferral.19
Amid the mutual deference between patron and sculptor, the question of the setting and backing to be designed by White was a subject of lengthy consideration and finally heated contention. An unsuccessful early proposal may be represented in three sketches for the monument that show a dark figure set against a rounded, rough-hewn rock, as if within a grotto (Figure 34). Facing the figure is a long, straight seat for visitors, with upward-stretching wings accenting the two ends. Low stone “copings” outline the perimeter of the rectangular space within the monument proper. The architectural setting seems to have taken its approximate final shape by August 1888, with a polished rectangular stele rather than a rockface boulder behind the figure and a more classicizing seat fashioned in sections to harmonize with the six-sided shape chosen for the monument’s interior layout.20 Like the earlier proposal, this design would manipulate the viewer. The visitor must enter the interior space, separated from the cemetery grounds like the space of an open-air temple or sacred area, before turning to see the sculpture. In each case, entry is from the rear or side of the sculpture, via steps that face the seat. The seat and environment were part of the initial plan for a harmonious melding of architecture and sculpture, somewhat similar to the complex spatial plans Saint-Gaudens and White had designed for their public sculptures, such as The Puritan and the Standing Lincoln. Just as the visitor passes through the gates of the cemetery to enter a space beyond the daily material world, so must the visitor ascend two steps to enter a separate space for contemplation at the Adams Memorial, still further removed. As scholar Kirk Savage has explained, Saint-Gaudens and White were pioneers in a broader shift in the conception of the public monument, from an object of reverence to a space of subjective experience, here within a natural multisensorial context.21 One could circulate around the sculpture from left to right, but the monument’s setting and landscaping ultimately guided and restricted the visitor’s steps.22 In the final setting, owl’s wings demarcate the ends of the seat.23 Landscaping added after the memorial’s completion also shielded the sculpture from the viewers’ sight until they had entered the memorial, which over the years became a kind of natural chapel as the plantings grew.
Figure 34.
Stanford White, early concept for the setting of the Adams Memorial. Ink drawing. Augustus Saint-Gaudens Papers. Courtesy of Dartmouth College
Adams and White had agreed to place the sculpture in a green marble setting, but the stone company found that it could not extract large enough blocks for the project, and a rosy granite had to be chosen instead.24 This unexpected development was part of a slow evolution over the years to a simpler and less decorative monument than originally considered. The green marble, perhaps related to Adams’s love of Renaissance sculpture with its colorful inlaid pietra dura setting, would have featured much veining and a considerable variation in color—quite different from the uniform consistency of color in the pink granite. Granite is also harder and more expensive to polish, not allowing the detail that can be carved in marble. But it has likely worn far better than the green marble would have and proved, as White said, the surer stone.25 All of the materials, however, were much more colorful and conspicuous than the white stone markers that predominated in the cemetery. Bronze figures were still unusual in cemeteries, some of which prohibited metal sculpture.
During the summer of 1889, Adams’s mother passed away, and his anxiety about the memorial grew. White and Saint-Gaudens, meantime, both took time out to travel to Europe. Saint-Gaudens joined the architect in Paris for about two weeks to see the 1889 world’s fair, which critics hailed as bringing together the work of “the best modern French sculptors.”26 While Saint-Gaudens already had developed his basic conception for the Adams figure before his trip abroad, prototypes offered in Paris may have helped shape its completion, in part by reaffirming the high importance of funerary sculpture in Europe. Among the French sculptures on exhibit was Antonin Mercié’s Le Souvenir (Figure 35), also designed for the grave of a deceased wife. The high-relief marble figure is a seated woman, with her knees turned to her right and head tilted to her left. She is young, very pretty, clearly female, with the drapery over her head more delicate and active than in the final Adams monument.27 It is far from the weighty, more abstract supernatural being Saint-Gaudens would create, and the naming of the figure (Memory) helps to plant her identity firmly as an allegory and separate her from her more indeterminate and distant cousin. Also at the exposition were the moody, archaizing paintings of French artist Puvis de Chavannes, which critics saw as truly spiritual. Puvis was a precursor to a more radical vein of symbolism that was developing in tandem with Saint-Gaudens’s work on the Adams monument, preferring the evocative to the descriptive, the realm of intuition, dream, and the antirational. In addition, Saint-Gaudens may have revisited Père Lachaise, Montmartre, or Montparnasse cemeteries, the grand repositories of French memorial art, during his trip.28
Figure 35.
Antonin Mercié, Le Souvenir, 1885–89. Replica of the tomb of Madame Charles Ferry Parnay (Maine-et-Loire). Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.
On his return to the United States, White reported to Adams October 26, “I found St. Gaudens working like a beaver on your figure. I was very much impressed by it. I think if he finishes it as well as he has started it, it will be the most poetical thing he has done.”29 Saint-Gaudens worked in his New York studio on the full-size figure with a model still posing before him. It has been suggested that at this stage he first modeled a seated nude in clay, and then dipped coarse burlap in a thin clay slurry and draped this over the figure.30 In his Reminiscences, Saint-Gaudens describes how the tonalist painter Thomas Dewing sat “quietly smoking beside the posing model and chatting with me” one day as he worked “on the platform there at Mr. Henry Adams’ Rock Creek Cemetery figure.”31 The Shaw monument (on which he labored for thirteen years) stood in the center of the studio, extending from wall to wall. Dewing, through his paintings of isolated female figures, was one of the leaders of an aesthetic of hazy quietism in American art, which eschewed detailed description. He also became something of an aficionado of Japanese prints in later years, when he aided collector Charles Lang Freer, who bought Asian and American art that shared this quality. Thus Dewing and Saint-Gaudens would have shared an understanding of the seated figure as a vehicle to mental serenity.
“I’ve demolished the figure several times and now its all going at once,” Saint-Gaudens wrote Adams on February 21, 1890. Two months later he asked Adams to come see the figure, offering with tact to have him “look at it during my absence” before discussing it.32 When Adams declined the invitation, Saint-Gaudens offered to “bronze” the plaster and set it up in the cemetery “so that you can judge of its effect in metal.” He continued, “In any event I should like to have you see the face of the figure in the clay. If it were not for that part of the work I would not trouble you but the face is an instrument on which different strains can be played and I may have struck a key in a direction quite different from your feeling in the matter. With a word from you I could strike another tone with as much interest and fervor as I have had with the present one.”33
Adams wrote later, perhaps with some disingenuousness, that he declined to look at the model because he had “many misgivings” that it would not meet his own ideal and was afraid that he “might not be able to conceal my disappointment. So I devolved the duty on La Farge” of looking at it and talking it over with Saint-Gaudens. “I knew well that I should only injure St Gaudens’ work … by suggesting changes, for the artist is usually right in regarding changes, not his own, as blemishes,” he said, thus crediting himself with an unusually liberal attitude toward artistic freedom to complete a graveyard sculpture.34 With no visit from Adams expected, Saint-Gaudens finally wrote on May 16, 1890: “I have gone as far as I can in the figure and shall now have it cast.”35
As Saint-Gaudens was winding up his work on the figure, a dispute over the design of the granite stele that would stand behind it opened a bitter personal schism between Adams and White. The architect would bear the brunt of Adams’s impatience with delay after delay in the production of the monument.36 Adams wished the upright stone behind the figure to be relatively plain. But his austere taste went strongly against the kind of classicizing ornamentation used customarily by White and Saint-Gaudens on their public monuments. White frequently replicated details of antique sculpture and decoration on his Beaux-Arts public buildings and opulent Gilded Age homes for the wealthy. His houses were full of eclectic bits of European and Greek ornament, which he called “tools of trade.”37 White designed picture frames with borders of beribboned laurel leaves, intricately patterned magazine covers and jewelry, and he was a sought-after decorator, who brought together a catholic taste in rich textures, varied colors, and juxtaposition of elements. He espoused the theory that all things intrinsically good can be brought into harmony, and his slogan was that architecture was one of the fine arts.38
Adams preferred to exclude the ornament and traditional inscription that White proposed. “You will have to settle this,” White wrote Saint-Gaudens on February 4, 1890, declaring that if the slab of stone were left plain, there would be “a lack of design … which is somewhat stupid, and of course the monument as a whole will be very much injured by a lack of holding together in style.” At the same time, White added, “I think your figure and Adams’ wishes should be first considered, so let me know what you wish done.”39
Architectural drawings now retained in the McKim, Mead & White collection at the New-York Historical Society (Figure 36) show that certain design elements had been anticipated. On the “front” of the headstone, a circle is shown behind the figure’s head and upper body, much like the nimbus found in Japanese representations of the Kwannon and La Farge’s paintings of the Buddhist deity. White clearly expected through May 1890 that it would be a part of the final design, for he wrote Saint-Gaudens then asking for its measurements. While awaiting an answer, he wrote the contractor, “Mr. St. Gaudens, the sculptor, had some ideas of having the signs of the zodiac running around here and I have written him at once.”40 In the drawings, the “back” of the headstone also contained a tablet with the inscription: “IN MEMORIAM,” then “PKE ADAMS,” with Roman numerals for life dates. White wrote the contractor in January 1890 that the letters would be incised. On both sides of the tablet, the drawings showed upside-down torches, a conventional sign for life extinguished.41 A Greek meander bordered the stone slab.
Figure 36.
Plan for the Adams Memorial, with circle for zodiac in front and upside-down torches and inscription at the back, 1890. McKim, Mead and White Architectural Records, Collection of the New-York Historical Society.
“You asked that in whatever was placed back of the figure the architecture should have nothing to say and above all that it should not be classic,” Saint-Gaudens wrote Adams. “White and I have mulled over this a great deal with the enclosed results.… I do not think the small classical cornice and base can affect the figure and to my thinking the monument will be better as a whole.”42 Adams seems to have accepted the “classical cornice and base,” as they appear on the final monument. Much of the rest of White’s planned decoration was eliminated, however, after a battle of miscommunication and strong wills, and the back is now decorated with two interlocking wreaths symbolizing lives intertwined.
Adams grew increasingly testy as he prepared to depart in August 1890 for a trip to the South Seas with La Farge. He had hoped to see the monument in place before he began the year-and-a-half-long journey. Before leaving, he arranged to leave checks for White to distribute to Norcross Brothers and Saint-Gaudens on completion of the project. He apparently used that occasion to berate the architect about the delays and dispute over ornamentation.
White was often described as a man who invested a great deal of effort in building and retaining friendships.43 His relation with Saint-Gaudens was a close and precious one, and his handwritten June 24 letter records his angry response to Adams:
I shall say nothing to St Gaudens about your note—as I am sure it would completely upset him—and perhaps injure the work in its completion—at the same time, it is quite a weight of woe for me to carry alone.… I cannot tell you how badly your letter has made me feel—and I do not know but that the next artist you deal with without the same gentleness of spirit, may perhaps be more fortunate and be left in a much more comfortable frame of mind than myself. Goodbye.44
White felt Adams had exceeded the boundaries of friendship and violated his code for personal and commercial relations. White wrote just one further letter to Adams that year—on July 7, 1890—acknowledging receipt of the checks for himself and Norcross Brothers and agreeing to pay Saint-Gaudens $3,000 when the bronze was completed and $3,500 when the bronze was erected and the monument completed. He concluded icily, “I beg you to believe that you will hear nothing further about it save its completion.”45
On July 27 White sent the contractor “a new revision of the Adams headstone” that could be carved out of the already roughed-out granite block, eliminating the upside-down torches envisaged for the back and the circle on the front of the headstone.46 The changes to the back may be seen in the plan: two circles for the wreaths have been drawn on top of the earlier inscription and scribbled lines crisscross the torches (Figure 37). An entwining vine and flowers remain. The cornice is smaller and lower than once expected.47 With these changes, the monument took on its final nature. On Adams’s instructions, it contained no words whatsoever—a radical move for this time. At what point this now-famous decision was made and whether it always was intended by Adams is not known. But it was only in the final months that White instructed the contractor to remove the tablet designed to bear the inscription.
Figure 37.
Revised plan for the back of the Adams Memorial, with torches and inscription scribbled out and interlocking wreaths added, 1890. McKim, Mead and White Architectural Records, Collection of the New-York Historical Society.
Whether by Adams’s expressed wish or Saint-Gaudens’s sensitive discernment of his desires, the finished monument also bears no visible foundry mark or any signature of the artist—it is wordless out of respect for Adams’s privacy. Adams did not believe in mixing the verbal and the visual.48 He courted anonymity in writing his novels and some journalistic pieces and had jealously guarded his privacy. At times, he wished to see if his work would be received as meritorious without the Adams name.
The casting by Henry-Bonnard Bronze Co. apparently was completed by December 10, 1890, when White sent Saint-Gaudens his check for $3,000, “fourth payment on account of figure for tomb at Washington.”49 A Kwannon-type rock for the figure to sit upon was shaped from Quincy granite, an interesting iconographic selection since Quincy, after all, was the “ancestral village” of the Adamses, and Quincy granite is a stone famed for its strength and permanence. The tombs of Henry Adams’s ancestors in Quincy’s Hancock Cemetery also were encased in local granite.50
On August 15, 1890, Adams departed for San Francisco with La Farge to begin his South Seas journey, still anxious that he might be leaving his monument in the hands of an artist and architect who did not understand his personal goals. “St. Gaudens is not in the least oriental, and is not even familiar with oriental conceptions. Stanford White is still less so,” he wrote later, spelling out the concerns he had suffered.51 As he visited Hawaii, Samoa, and Tahiti, his letters home frequently inquired about the progress of his monument. His harsh words to White in 1890 were repeated in letters to his friends, including Elizabeth Cameron, to whom he wrote repeatedly and with an increasing intimacy and emotional dependency. Adams clearly had long-held and deep feelings for Cameron, a former friend of Clover’s and a niece of General William Tecumseh Sherman, who was locked in a loveless marriage to a U.S. senator. Scholars have speculated as to whether his attraction to her contributed to Clover’s suicide and whether the pair ever consummated their relationship.52 With considerable irony, Adams wrote Cameron from Tahiti on February 6: “Formerly, in Hawaii, whenever a new house or temple was built, a human victim had to be killed to be put under its first post. If I could, I should club St Gaudens and Stanford White, and put them under their own structure. Nothing has distressed me like their outrageous disregard of my feelings in this matter. Never spare an architect or artist hereafter. Make their lives intolerable, and have no pity, for they will have none on you.”53
And on February 10, 1891, he wrote Theodore Dwight that he had still received no word from Saint-Gaudens: “Apparently both St Gaudens and White are afraid to write to me … White knows already my feelings on the subject, and I think St Gaudens must suspect them, if no more.… At times I begin to doubt whether St Gaudens will ever let the work be finished. I half suspect that my refusal to take the responsibility of formally approving it, in the clay, frightened him.… From the first I told St Gaudens that he should be absolutely free from interference. The result is that after nearly five years I am not certain that his work will ever be delivered.”54
Adams’s doubts were not borne out, however, as the monument finally was installed in Rock Creek Cemetery in March. Norcross called for the bronze figure on February 28, 1891, saying he wanted it “before I take down [the] Derrick as I presume it is heavy.”55 On March 13, Saint-Gaudens sent Adams his receipt for $3,500, “final payment on account of bronze figure placed in Rock Creek Cemetery.”56 And on March 14 Cameron could at long last write: “My dear Mr. Adams: The work at Rock Creek is now quite finished, and I think that you will be satisfied and pleased with it.… it is inexpressibly noble and beautiful” (Figures 38, 39).57 John Hay also wrote in late March that he had visited the cemetery with his son Adelbert, joining Cameron and another friend there. His report seemed to summarize all that the patron had hoped for: “The work is indescribably noble and imposing. It is, to my mind, St. Gaudens’s masterpiece. It is full of poetry and suggestion. Infinite wisdom; a past without beginning and a future without end; a repose, after limitless experience; a peace, to which nothing matters—all embodied in this austere and beautiful face and form.”58
Figure 38.
The Adams Memorial in its final setting. Undated photograph. Prints and Photograph Division, Library of Congress.
Adams said he wept when he read Hay’s words. He quoted them to Saint-Gaudens in a letter from Fiji, declaring, “Certainly I could not have expressed my own wishes so exactly, and if your work approaches Hay’s description, you cannot fear criticism from me.”59 Hay’s description of a being in a state of serenity—an impersonal, universalized statement—would become the canonical interpretation for Adams’s inner circle, and Adams repeated it to Saint-Gaudens after he received the first photographs of the monument in place.
Figure 39.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the Adams Memorial (detail). Photo by Cynthia Mills.
Clara Hay also took Clarence King, whose own health was failing, to the cemetery. “He thinks as I do that it is the most important work yet done on our side [of the Atlantic]; the best of St. Gaudens or anybody else,” her husband wrote Adams in June 1891, striking a note of nationalistic pride.60 By the reactions they conveyed to Adams, the members of this alliance of genteel cosmopolitans reaffirmed their loyalties as they rose above the popular culture of the cemetery. They were aware that most American cemetery monuments were “stock productions,” the result of commercial transactions in which there was no parity or personal relations between purchaser, maker, and seller, and the degree of personalization of the average marker was minimal. By contrast, they felt that this monument was the product of an intellectual and artistic collaboration worthy of an American Medici. Cemeteries also were places where rivalries in displays of wealth were played out. These friends, with Adams, felt taste and “art” ultimately would outrank massive stone mausoleums of the nouveau riche and ever-taller obelisks.
Adams would agree when he finally saw the monument upon his return from the South Seas. Rather than explaining his goals for the monument, he laid down a challenge about its real meaning and its distinctive assertion of group identity in his later autobiography, writing in the third person: “His first step, on returning to Washington, took him out to the cemetery known as Rock Creek, to see the bronze figure which St. Gaudens had made for him in his absence. Naturally every detail interested him; every line; every touch of the artist; every change of light and shade; every point of relation; every possible doubt of St. Gaudens’s correctness of taste or feeling.” Adams said he interpreted the statue’s “meaning” to be “the oldest idea known to human thought,” an idea he never spelled out. Instead, he said,
He knew that if he asked an Asiatic its meaning, not a man, woman, or child from Cairo to Kamtchatka would have needed more than a glance to reply. From the Egyptian Sphinx to the Kamakura Diabuts; from Prometheus to Christ; from Michel Angelo to Shelley, art had wrought on this eternal figure almost as though it had nothing to say. The interest of the figure was not in its meaning, but in the response of the observer.… Like all great artists, St. Gaudens held up the mirror and no more.61
As Adams predicted, the reception of the monument became a shifting terrain for a battle over identity and legacy.
