TitleAugustus Saint Gaudens
Artist
Kenyon Cox
(American, 1856 - 1919)
Date1888
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 21 × 16 7/8 in.
Framed: 32 1/2 × 28 3/8 × 3 1/2 in.
SignedSigned upper left: "K. C. 1888"
SubmissionANA diploma presentation, March 4, 1889
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number288-P
Label TextA loyal friend of Saint-Gaudens and a dedicated proponent of his work, Cox published several appreciations of the sculptor during his lifetime as well as after his death. Although he had met Saint-Gaudens during his student days in Paris, they did not become close friends until Cox's return to New York (Cox to his mother). Following the sculptor's death, Cox wrote that he "was not merely the most accomplished artist of America, not merely one of the foremost sculptors of his time-we shall feel that he is one of those great, creative minds, transcending time and place, not of America or of to-day, but of the world and forever" (Atlantic Monthly, 310). [stet hyph: to-day]
The Academy's portrait was executed a year after Cox's more elaborate representation of the sculptor working in his studio (1887, destroyed 1904; replica, 1908, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). After that celebrated portrait was destroyed when fire swept Saint-Gaudens's Cornish, New Hampshire, studio in 1904, Cox wrote, "A study, of the head only, in the collection of the National Academy of Design, is now the only existing portrait of him painted from life in his best years" (Atlantic Monthly, 300). It was this work that Cox used to paint the replica (Augustus Saint-Gaudens: The Portrait Reliefs). In November 1907 this portrait, draped in black, was hung in a place of honor in the Academy room of the Fine Arts Building at 215 West Fifty-seventh Street.
