The Metropolitan Museum possesses
a portrait of him in his last years, by Miss Ellen Emmet, and a replica,
painted since his death, of my own earlier portrait.
From the illness he brought back from Paris in 1900 Saint-Gaudens never
recovered. At times he showed something of his old vigor and was able
not only to do fine work but to indulge more in out-of-door sports than
he had ever done in his youth, while a growing love for nature and for
literature made his life fuller, in some respects, than in the days when
his own art more entirely absorbed him. But year by year his strength
grew less and his intervals of freedom from pain grew shorter, and he
was more and more forced to rely upon the corps of able and devoted
assistants which he gathered about him. He developed to an extraordinary
extent the faculty of communicating his ideas and desires to others and
of producing through their hands work essentially his own and of a
quality entirely beyond their ability; but it was at the cost of a
strain upon brain and nerve almost infinitely greater than would have
been involved in work done with his own hand. In the summer of 1906 he
broke down utterly, the work of his studio was interrupted, and he
ceased to see even his most intimate friends. He rallied somewhat from
this attack, and began again his heroic struggle against fate, directing
the work of assistants while himself so weak that he had to be carried
from the house to the studio.
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