In real life the hero had stood about five feet six. To transpose the life-size clay model into its final heroic scale required that hundreds of measurements be made with calipers, and so a large scaffold had to be built beside the statue from which the workers could reach the uppermost portions of the figure.
But the mathematics of the system and even the most skilled use of calipers were never sufficient in and of themselves. The artist’s eye and the desire to breathe life into the clay had to be the deciding factors at almost every stage.
Saint-Gaudens would write of the “toughness” of the sculptor’s challenge, all the problems to be dealt with, the different helpers, the equipment and rubbish, and “all the while trying to soar into the blue.”
He excused the delays that came with the work on the ground that a sculptor’s efforts endured so long that it was nearly a crime to fail to do everything possible to achieve a worthy result. He had a terrible dread of making a bad sculpture. “A poor picture goes into the garret,” he would write, “books are forgotten, but the bronze remains, to amuse or shame the populace and perpetuate one of our various idiocies.”
The finished work had to convey the reality and importance of a singular personality. It had to be more than “a good likeness.” It had to express the character of the man.
“Farragut’s legs seem to be pretty troublesome,” Gussie reported. Farragut must stand braced on proper sea legs, Gus insisted. But how to achieve that?
A friend from New York, the editor of Scribner’s Monthly, Richard Watson Gilder, who was visiting Paris and was short like Farragut, agreed to pose for the legs. Still Gus fretted. “He has been very much bothered by one of Farragut’s legs, and has been working on it for weeks. He is not satisfied yet,” Gussie wrote later, just before he took ill.
The admiral’s buttons and braid, his cap, sword, all had to be true to fact and a natural part of him, like his stance. Greater still was the importance of the face, and the face, the head, unlike a portrait on canvas, had to look right from every angle. The whole work must look right from every angle.
Even with Saint-Gaudens back on the job following his illness, the work fell steadily further behind schedule. Expenses kept mounting, and to her parents, who were still faithfully providing financial help, Gussie felt obliged to explain what the work now involved and why even more help was needed. “Am sorry to bother you so much but we must have some money or else collapse,” she wrote bluntly at one point. Just the wheels of the dolly on which the clay model turned cost $40, she emphasized.
Her unshaken belief in her husband was plain. She wanted those at home to know how hard he was working and how much he had to put up with on the job. Almost no one seemed to understand how much he needed time to work and to think without interruptions. “He is very much bothered by visitors [to the studio] at all hours. He can’t turn them out. He isn’t made so. …”
“Gus is working on Farragut’s left leg today,” she wrote on May 8, 1879. A week later she could report, “Augustus … seems to be conquering the legs which have been his bête noire.” On May 30 she could at last announce, “Farragut has two legs to stand on,” but had to say also that Farragut still “bothers Gus a great deal. He finds it hard work to satisfy himself.”
By June he had moved on to the flap on the admiral’s coat, intending that it appear to be blowing in the wind. To Gussie it was a marvel how he made the silk lining and the cloth of the coat look as if made of silk and cloth.
She felt increasingly happy—with what he was creating and with their life together. One Sunday they spent an entire afternoon in the Bois de Boulogne, just the two of them, picking wildflowers and sitting talking under the trees. She had never loved Paris more. “It is strange how fascinating the life here becomes after living a couple of years. There is always so much to see and do.” She painted a portrait of a friend, the wife of an expatriate American doctor named Farlow. The doctor was so pleased with the result he asked her to do him as well.
Work on the pedestal with Stanford White continued, but when, with the return of summer, White chose to go off to Italy, Gus decided to go, too. His doctors told him he needed rest and a change of scene. Gussie traveled with her sister Genie to Château d’Oex in Switzerland, to wait for Gus to join them there. He arrived on August 6, bringing her a beautiful lamp to hang in their parlor in Paris, and together with White they stayed on in Switzerland for another few days.
The time away had done Gus great good. “[He] feels like a lion,” she said. Decisions on the pedestal had been resolved, and White returned to New York. All was fine, it seemed.
But something had gone wrong between Gus and White. What happened is not altogether clear. The nearest thing to an explanation was provided later by sister Genie. Gus’s “friendship, or perhaps I should say affection, was limited,” Genie wrote, due to certain sides to White’s personality and way of life.
In early days, mingled with White’s enthusiasm, extraordinary activity and capacity for work, kindly instinct and friendliness, which made him personally attractive, were his aggressive, violent prejudice and a certain snobbishness that annoyed [Gus]. …
Gus cared nothing about food or clothes, no more now than in his student days in Paris. He would wear shirts until they were filled with holes, as Gussie lamented, and, according to Genie, he came to view with contempt White’s adoration of food. Food was the way White “showed his self-indulgence in those days,” Genie said, and recalled how, when crossing a mountain pass in Switzerland, White insisted on delaying everything for several hours in order that he could taste some famous dish at a local inn, which infuriated Gus.
Undoubtedly there was more to it than that, and whatever the issue, it appears to have begun in Italy. In a letter to White later, Gus said he was “feeling sorry for things [he had done] in Italy,” but in response White urged no more apologizing: “If ever a man acted well [in Italy], you did, and I ought to have been kicked for many reasons.”
Whatever the cause of the disagreement, the friendship was not broken; it only cooled somewhat. Their work together continued.
Much of great importance had still to be resolved, not the least of which were the final height and location of the monument.
Correspondence between Gus and White continued. There were questions about the kind of stone to be used for the pedestal and the design of two relief angels representing Courage and Loyalty that Gus was to do. Union Square, at Broadway and 14th Street, remained the favorite choice for the location among members of the Farragut Commission, and Saint-Gaudens was inclined to agree, though he had some concern about the height of the statue of Lafayette by Bartholdi in the square.
In New York, White went to look over the site and reported that the Lafayette stood not more than eight feet, four inches. “If you stick to eight feet, six inches, I do not think you will go much wrong,” he told Saint-Gaudens.
White thought Madison Square Park, farther uptown between 23rd and 26th streets, on Fifth Avenue, and in particular at the corner of 26th and Fifth, was a far preferable spot—“a quiet and distinguished place … where the aristocratic part of the avenue begins … and the stream of people walking down Fifth Avenue would see it at once.” He also reminded Gus that Delmonico’s, the most fashionable dining place in town, was directly across the street, and Gus understood what that alone meant to White.
“Go for Madison Square,” Gus responded.
He and White both knew how important the monument could be to New York, as well as their own careers. He was calling on everything in his power, Gus wrote to former minister to France John Dix, a member of the commission, “to break away from the regular conventional statues.”
October 14, 1879: … Aug is just as busy and bothered as he can be. He has three men at work in the studio besides Louis, and the molder much of the time and so much going on distracts him very much. They are getting ready to enlarge the statue and yesterday they made some mistakes and it took the whole lot of them al
l today to undo and [re]do what they did yesterday. A sculptor friend of Aug told him he would be made nearly wild with it and that for a long time apparently nothing would seem to be accomplished. I tell you all this to give you an idea of what is going on. Aug is going to enlarge the head in wax and will do it here [in the apartment] in the evenings. He is fussing over the Farragut and working on angles [for the pedestal] now. I wish I could help him but there seems to be nothing I can do but keep the house going and his clothes in order. Louis works as hard as he can and is never satisfied unless he is doing something. As daylight is so precious we are going to try going to bed at nine and getting up at half past six or thereabouts. I don’t know how it will work, but we will try anyway. …
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.
III
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.”