Over the years, Daniel Chester French (Figure 54) had learned to organize large civic projects in collaboration with other artists and architects, taking bids, managing budgets, and persuading patrons and committees to lend their support. Despite his occasional private complaints, he gained a reputation for being a mild-mannered professional who worked harmoniously with others, as well as attaining renown for his skill and excellent judgment in design and execution. He generously participated in a number of artistic organizations, especially after performing his central role in the 1893 world’s fair, which added greatly to his network of associates. Later his Lincoln Memorial figure in Washington, D.C., confirmed his status, making him the major public sculptor of his era after the death of Saint-Gaudens.
French ultimately used his nexus of connections to become an ambassador for contemporary American sculpture and, in a parallel development, for funerary sculpture in the United States, through his decades of work with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. While the museum had an initial collection of neoclassical sculpture, prominently including William Wetmore Story’s dramatic Medea and Cleopatra, and increased its acquisitions in number and stylistic variety in the late nineteenth century with the aid of such artist-consultants as John Quincy Adams Ward, French greatly influenced its holdings after his election as a trustee and chairman of the museum’s Committee on Sculpture in 1903. According to sculpture curator Thayer Tolles, French was almost single-handedly responsible for the acquisition by the museum of its substantial core collection of American bronzes in the early twentieth century. Under French and with the aid of an important bequest from Jacob S. Rogers, a member of the museum who died in 1901, the Metropolitan established the single most influential collection of contemporary American sculpture, with key examples from all major sculptors.1
The museum began acquiring plasters of essential pieces, with the idea that it would later commission bronze casts or marble carvings of some of these works. French considered key cemetery sculptures to be suitable for inclusion in the contemporary collection as well as in exhibitions. In 1908 he also played a central role in organizing an ambitious retrospective exhibition of 154 works by Augustus Saint-Gaudens after the celebrated sculptor’s passing, and the Metropolitan arranged with Henry Adams for a cast of the Adams Memorial to be created and loaned to the museum for inclusion in that show. Due to Adams’s great desire for privacy, this was the first major public exhibition of the Adams monument outside the cemetery, a situation very different from the extensive earlier showings of the Duveneck and Milmore memorials.2 The sculpture became, in effect, a memorial to Saint-Gaudens in the art world.
Figure 54.
Margaret French Cresson, bronze bust of Daniel Chester French, 1933. Courtesy of The Chesterwood Archives, Chapin Library, Williams College, gift of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Chesterwood, a National Trust Historic Site in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Saint-Gaudens had died August 3, 1907, at age fifty-nine at his country home in Cornish, New Hampshire, after a long, painful battle with cancer. Tragically, his close friend and associate Stanford White had been murdered in Madison Square Garden just the year before. Harry Thaw, the millionaire husband of White’s mistress, shot the architect in a jealous rage, and the sensational trial that followed, ending in a deadlocked jury, only deepened Saint-Gaudens’s depression during his struggle with illness.3 In his final years, he investigated the image of Jesus Christ in several of his projects, including a memorial to the Episcopal minister Phillips Brooks at Trinity Church in Boston, developing a new personal introspection about Christianity. His last funerary sculpture design, which was completed by assistants in 1911, was a seated Christ flanked by two bas-relief angels, created for the family gravesite of the wealthy banker George Fisher Baker in Valhalla, New York.4 A death mask made by plaster caster Gaetan Ardisson at the time of Saint-Gaudens’s passing documents the decline and great suffering of this once robust and beloved artist (Figure 55).5
After the sculptor’s remains had been taken to Mount Auburn Cemetery for cremation and then carried back to Cornish by his son Homer, a private funeral service was held in the small studio at Cornish. Unitarian minister Oliver B. Emerson, the artist’s brother-in-law, read a prayer by Robert Louis Stevenson that appears on a monument Saint-Gaudens designed: “Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and a quiet mind.” Artist Kenyon Cox told the hushed assembly of family and friends that while Saint-Gaudens had professed no specific religious creed, “he believed in the universal God and was a God-inspired man.” The service in the studio, accompanied by organ music, was decorated with “many beautiful floral emblems,” the Boston Herald reported.6 At his wife Augusta’s wish, the classical temple and altar and the two Ionic columns that had figured as a stage set for a pageant (known as the Masque of the Golden Bowl) held at Cornish in 1905 in Saint-Gaudens’s honor were eventually re-created in white Vermont marble as the family sepulcher (Figure 56).7 The temple is located in a secluded area on the grounds of the Cornish estate, which Saint-Gaudens had named Aspet after his father’s native village in France. It is decorated with classicizing emblems such as eagles, garlands, and ram’s heads, and the words “In Memoriam Augustus Saint-Gaudens” and “Beati Mortui Qui in Domino Moriuntur Anodo Iam dicit Spiritus ut requiescant a laboribus suis opera enim illorum sequuntur illos” (Blessed are the dead who die in the grace of the Lord. Yes, says the spirit, that they may rest from their labors and their good works follow them; Revelation 14:13).8
Figure 55.
Gaetano Ardisson, Death Mask of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1907. U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire.
Figure 56.
Saint-Gaudens family tomb, 1914. Marble. Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire. Photo by Cynthia Mills.
With Saint-Gaudens’s death, the early sensitivity about the display or reproduction of the Adams Memorial ended. The sculpture was pictured and described repeatedly in the spate of public praise for the late sculptor’s work, integrity, courage, and patriotism. The image of the Adams monument, now disassociated from Marian Adams’s death and Henry Adams’s decades of mourning, was even placed on the cover of the program handed out at a large memorial gathering honoring Saint-Gaudens, at New York City’s Mendelssohn Hall on February 29, 1908. Mayor George B. McClellan gave the keynote speech at the memorial meeting, which was held just before the gala March 3 opening of the retrospective exhibition of the sculptor’s works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hailing Saint-Gaudens’s abilities, the mayor commented that the “inscrutable and wonderful” statue in Rock Creek Cemetery, standing apart in its mystery from his other work, was masterful enough to have won him celebrity on its own without his many other achievements.9
For his part, Henry Adams began deferring to Augusta Saint-Gaudens, who made it her mission to spread the fame of her deceased husband’s works and to personally control their display and reproduction. When Metropolitan Museum of Art official Edward Robinson formally requested Adams’s permission to have the plaster cast made of the cemetery monument for the 1908 Saint-Gaudens retrospective, Adams quickly agreed out of a desire to honor his late sculptor-friend.10
The New York retrospective exhibition of Saint-Gaudens’s work was hailed as the largest display ever of one American sculptor’s works staged to date. An aging Adams’s only condition for including the plaster cast was that it bear no allegorical title like “Grief,” which the media had insisted on attaching to it. To strengthen his view that such a title would dilute the monument’s power in suggesting the mystery of death, he now stated that it would dishonor Saint-Gaudens’s intentions. He wrote to Robinson in January 1908: “Do you think it necessary to tag poor St Gaudens’ work when he did not? My notion of it is that he meant it to ask the question,—like the Sphinx,—and that he wanted to leave the riddle to be answered by each individual.… [A]t all events, for the salvation of your soul, do not inflict on it the usual names of newspapers.” The plaster finally was shown with the title Adams Monument, Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C. A note in the exhibition catalogue added, “The figure has been variously interpreted, although Saint-Gaudens gave no name to it.”11
The retrospective drew tens of thousands of visitors, who had the opportunity to see the Adams figure displayed along a side wall flanked by greenery. There was some criticism, however, that the sculpture was decontextualized in the museum show, in which the pieces were arranged more or less chronologically. The experience of a personal pilgrimage to the cemetery was lost, as was the Stanford White stonework. Writer Royal Cortissoz commented that the work appeared at a “distinct disadvantage” without its natural setting, saying, “It would have been wiser to have shown this masterpiece in an immense photograph.” Augusta Saint-Gaudens also was unhappy with the Metropolitan exhibition, especially since the Adams monument was displayed on a raised platform when she felt it was meant to be viewed at eye level as at the cemetery. She had architect Glenn Brown take charge of installing the retrospective when it traveled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in late 1908 (Figure 57) and then the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Art Institute of Chicago, and John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis in 1909.12
President Theodore Roosevelt and ambassadors from a number of nations spoke at the black-tie opening of the Washington exhibition in December 1908, attended by some two thousand of the capital city’s elite. At the Corcoran, the plaster cast was shown between two Doric columns, with cypress plantings creating a separate environment for it, and a green grass mat on the floor.13
Figure 57.
Cast of the Adams Memorial on display at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., during retrospective exhibition of the work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1908. Augustus Saint-Gaudens Papers. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.
The plaster cast shown in these retrospectives eventually was donated, along with a number of others, to the Saint-Gaudens Memorial, a kind of museum established by Augusta Saint-Gaudens at the family estate at Cornish, now administered by the National Park Service. It remained there until it was destroyed in a 1944 fire.14 Though the Metropolitan Museum under French took steps to acquire other works by Saint-Gaudens, now holding an important collection second only to the one at Cornish, it was never able to acquire a cast of the Adams tomb for its permanent collection.
In 1918 funerary works by Saint-Gaudens, French, and Duveneck were displayed at a major exhibition of American sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum, spurring a new wave of interest in these achievements. French had arranged for the museum to acquire a plaster of the Elizabeth Boott Duveneck tomb, cast from one at the Cincinnati museum.15 Plasters of the Adams Memorial, Saint-Gaudens’s Amor Caritas, and French’s own Angel of Death and the Sculptor were also shown at the 1918 exhibition, which led to critical comparisons of the three artists’ most famous funerary work.16 The New York Times, for example, called French’s Milmore opus “magnificent” and noted the presence of Saint-Gaudens’s Adams Memorial. It devoted the most attention to the Duveneck tomb, however, saying, “A beautiful figure, which occupies the centre of one of the galleries, is Frank Duveneck’s ‘Recumbent Figure of Mrs. Elizabeth Booth [sic] Duveneck,’ for a sarcophagus, with a sweet young face, which has the appearance of sleep. Upon the full draperies rests a large palm.”17 In the museum, the monuments were separated from the grim reality of bodies resting below in the cemetery, and comparisons proved inevitable.
Arts writer Adeline Adams compared and contrasted the Adams and Milmore memorials in her more extended discussion for the Metropolitan Museum’s own Bulletin, writing:
In the two great memorials, one by Saint-Gaudens, one by French, the spectator notes two different, yet two equally lofty ways of meeting and interpreting the great mystery. The Rock Creek figure, almost Oriental and fatalistic, supremely truthful in theme as in handling, holds out to the passer no promises which may never be performed, and neither affirms nor denies for him whatever faith may be in him. She remains aloof, unfathomed, a subject for endless conjecture, while the Milmore angel, scarcely less majestic, draws nearer to our common humanity because she offers an infinitely consoling answer to our human questionings.18
The Duveneck tomb’s clear continuity of tradition with Renaissance forms and portraiture contributed to its being admired by critics and sculptors alike in museum settings. By 1925 writer Francis Hamilton commented in International Studio that recumbent mortuary sculpture in general had been wrongly neglected by writers and the American public. Describing the Duveneck Memorial, he asserted, “It may be considered heretical to say so but I call this effigy infinitely more touching than the more famous Adams memorial figure by Saint-Gaudens in the Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington. In that work Saint-Gaudens appeared to say, ‘Behold I tell you a mystery,’ and his mystery appears to have any solution the beholder chooses. But in the case of the Mrs. Duveneck figure devotion was its spring and devotion remains its dominant effect. In that lies one of its perfections.”19 As we shall see, the work by Saint-Gaudens and French, however, went on to gain much greater popular awareness and recognition through photographs and pilgrimages, as did ultimately the grieving angel of William Wetmore Story, which apparently was never shown in a museum setting but gained its own following via photographs and copies found in American cemeteries.
While Saint-Gaudens had died at fifty-nine, French worked on nearly until his death at age eighty-one, and continued to be instrumental over the decades in the Metropolitan Museum’s acquisitions, including additional works by Saint-Gaudens.20 Once a genteel rival, French helped cement his colleague’s career as well as that of Duveneck.21 Meantime, a marble version of French’s own Milmore Memorial, dated 1929, was commissioned by the museum trustees and was carved by the Piccirilli Brothers. French had become a major maker of funerary monuments himself and the most famous sculptor of angels in America. His Mourning Victory from the Melvin Memorial in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts (1908; Figure 58), a majestic sunken relief honoring three brothers who died in the Civil War, is also represented in the collection by a 1915 marble carving. Today versions of the Milmore Angel of Death, the Melvin Memorial, and the Duveneck Memorial share space in the Metropolitan Museum of Art sculpture court along with Saint-Gaudens’s Amor Caritas, which evolved from the Morgan tomb project, making the museum one of the major fine-art centers for American funerary sculpture. These sculptures and others like the Marshall Field Memorial in Chicago and George White Memorial in Boston completed by French helped to inspire an evolving interest in museum-quality symbolic figures created by fine artists in cemeteries.
Figure 58.
Daniel Chester French, Melvin Memorial in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. Photo by Cynthia Mills.
A letter that French sent his friend Abbott Handerson Thayer in 1916 offers some insight into his feelings about the comparative qualities of his sculptures and those of Saint-Gaudens, which had attracted the greater praise to date. French acknowledged that critics often found his own work to be “placid.” But he added, “As to your comparison of Saint Gaudens and me, our work is so very different that it does not seem to me that any comparison is possible. I fear that posterity will not put me very near him, but I am sure posterity will find eternal pleasure in his work and I hope some discerning people will find something agreeable in some of mine.” French continued, “[I]t strikes me as a new idea [by Thayer] that he was too realistic or adhered too closely to nature. It is too long a subject to discuss by letter and I think I do see what you mean, but it is odd that I have thought that, if there was a defect in him, it was that he was somewhat too intent upon making a thing artistic and, in his conceptions at least, thought too much of the great things that had preceded him.”22
French died in October 1931, and funeral services were held in the studio at his country estate, Chesterwood, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, set against the hills and fields he had loved. Episcopal ministers read the 23rd and 121st Psalms, beginning “The Lord is my Shepherd” and “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,” and the soprano Rosalie Miller sang “Rest in Peace” by Franz Schubert and “Twilight and Dawn” by Oley Speaks. One studio wall was banked with hemlocks, and a white plaster model for French’s winged figure The Genius of Creation stood with arms stretched over his coffin, draped with gray velvet and a wreath decorated with sculptor’s tools. French’s ashes were buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, not far from his Melvin Memorial and the graves of Emerson, Thoreau, and the Alcotts, who had influenced his youth.23 His grave is marked by a simple stone slab with a garland of leaves and the words “A Heritage of Beauty,” a memorial similar to one he had designed for his brother’s tomb in Chicago after William’s death in 1914.24 Visitors leave pennies with the Lincoln Memorial on them in the garland.
With the passing of French, Saint-Gaudens, and Duveneck, the memorial art they had realized became a requiem to the artists as well as to the persons whose legacy they had been commissioned to secure. Yet it is to these heights of artistic memorialization that other patrons aspired, also wanting to join this league of the American Medicis who commissioned exceptional cemetery decorations.
Each man had contributed to the growth of interest in this form in fine-art circles. In the early years of the twentieth century the appeal of such celebrated, custom-made memorials attracted a new clientele. Artists were happy to expand their work into this realm, long honored in Europe. It was an opportunity to make ideal sculpture at a time when most public monuments still demanded a variant of naturalistic portraiture or decorative aestheticism. Designs for mortuary art began to appear more frequently in fine-art exhibitions, such as those of the National Sculpture Society, as well as museum settings. For example, a plaster of French’s Marshall Field Memorial was prominently exhibited at the Architectural League show in New York. Karl Bitter exhibited his funerary sculpture widely, showing his Hubbard and Villard memorials a few feet from each other at the National Sculpture Society’s Flower & Sculpture Exhibition at New York’s Madison Square Garden in November 1902. By April 1908 a Sculpture Society exhibition in Baltimore included models, variants, or photographs of work destined for cemeteries by Louis Amateis, Edward Berge, Bitter, Ephraim Keyser, Evelyn B. Longman, and Hans Schuler, among others.25 The campaign for improvement of cemetery sculpture continued in the years leading up to and immediately following World War I, when Adeline Adams reminded members of the American Arts Federation of the importance of memorial art throughout history, declaring, “We have said that taste and the tomb are often at odds, but let us remember that some of the most precious things of beauty shrined in our Museums were made for tombs and nothing else.”26