The Collected Traveler

While I'm just about finished with my Palermo post, I'm taking a detour first to the Augustus Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, New Hampshire.  I was familiar with the sculpture of Saint-Gaudens (pronounced to rhyme with the name of the poet, W. H. Auden) but had never visited his home (and studio) until a few summers ago.   The beautiful site celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2015 and it has the distinction of being the least visited park in the country.  

Saint-Gaudens began his life as an artist working for a cameo cutter in New York at the time of the Civil War.  He witnessed regiments of men marching off to war, he saw Ulysses Grant and Abraham Lincoln,  he saw wounded soldiers returning home from the war, and he saw President Lincoln lying in state at New York City's City Hall.  All of these images remained with him for his entire life and he would go on to create seven sculptures that memorialized the War.  He also became a pacifist.    

Like other artists of his day, Saint Gaudens went to Paris in 1867 and was the first American ever to enroll at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.  His work was exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1900, and reportedly Auguste Rodin doffed his hat in homage to the artist.  When he came back to New York he was married, to a painter named Augusta Homer (they became known as Gus and Gussie), and a lawyer friend proposed that they come up to New Hampshire for the summer.  Saint-Gaudens had just been commissioned for a Lincoln sculpture for the City of Chicago, and he converted an old hay barn on the property into a studio.  He ended up buying the house and its 80 acres and named it Aspet, after his French father's birthplace in France.  As Saint-Gaudens became more well known, other artists, such as Isadora Duncan and Maxfield Parrish, came to live in the area and their residences were known as the Cornish Colony.  Trails connecting their houses to each other still exist, and they wind through more than 100 acres of the park.  

Among the truly great works of Saint-Gaudens, one stands out: the Shaw Memorial, which is my favorite and is the real reason for this post.  It has been referred to as the greatest American sculpture of the 19th century, and it memorializes the 1st African American volunteer infantry unit of the Civil War, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment.  Saint-Gaudens was commissioned to create it for the city of Boston -- it stands at the corner of Beacon and Park Streets -- but there is another (slightly different) version of it in Cornish.  

Saint-Gaudens once remarked, "It's the way a thing is done that makes it right or wrong.  That's the only creed I have in art."  It took him 14 years to finish the Shaw Memorial, and curator Henry Duffy said, "It haunted him.  I think he just couldn't get it out of his mind."  From the day it was unveiled in Boston in 1897, the Memorial has moved people, including the writer Henry James, poet Robert Lowell, and composer Charles Ives.  Historian and author David McCullough noted in an interview with NPR that "The Shaw Memorial is the first time black Americans were ever portrayed in a work of sculpture as heroic, otherwise they were background.  But here they are the heroes who would, many of them, pay the ultimate price."                      

Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who was white, chose to fight with his men, instead of command from the sidelines.  In 1863, Shaw led the attack on Fort Wagner, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, and it was doomed before it began as the Union troops were overwhelmingly outnumbered by Confederate forces.  Shaw's soldiers fought fiercely and valiantly, but out of the 600 men, close to 300 were killed, including Shaw, who was the first to be shot.  After the battle was over, commanding Confederate General Johnson Hagood returned the bodies of Union officers who had died, with the exception of Shaw's.  Hagood explained that had Shaw been in command of white troops, he would have returned his body, as was customary for officers.  Instead, Shaw's body was stripped and thrown into a mass grave with his fallen black soldiers.    

The 1989 film 'Glory' brought the history of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment to national prominence. 

The Shaw Memorial was one of 16 public artworks damaged when protesters stormed through Boston Common on the 31st of May, exactly 123 years to the day it was dedicated to the city.  A three million dollar restoration project for the Memorial, delayed because of the Covid-19, had just been granted clearance the previous week.

    

BLACK LIVES MATTER.