The relief of angels for the
reredos of Saint Thomas's Church is the earliest important work which
shows his personal manner. It was undertaken in collaboration with John
La Farge, and perhaps the influence of La Farge, and of that eminently
picturesque genius Stanford White, mingled with that of the younger
French school in forming its decorative and almost pictorial character.
It was a kind of improvisation, done at prodigious speed and without
study from nature--a sketch rather than a completed work of art, but a
sketch to be slowly developed into the reliefs of the Farragut pedestal,
the angels of the Morgan tomb, the caryatids of the Vanderbilt
mantelpiece, and, at length, into such a masterpiece as the
"Amor-Caritas." In each of these developments the work becomes less
picturesque and more formal, the taste is purified, the exuberance of
decorative feeling is more restrained. The final term is reached in the
caryatids for the Albright Gallery at Buffalo--works of his last days,
when his hands were no longer able to shape the clay, yet essentially
his though he never touched them; works of an almost austere nobility of
style, the most grandly monumental figures he ever produced.
The commonest criticism on Saint-Gaudens's art has been that it is not,
primarily, sculptural in its inspiration; and, in a sense, the criticism
is justified.
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