It may have been due to the nature of the commissions he received that,
after the "Hiawatha" of his student days, he modelled no nude except the
"Diana" of the tower--a purely decorative figure, designed for distant
effect, in which structural modelling would have been out of place
because invisible. But it was not accident that in such draped figures
as the "Amor-Caritas" (Pl. 24) or the caryatids of the Vanderbilt
mantelpiece there is little effort to make the figure visible beneath
the draperies. In the hands of a master of the figure--of one of those
artists to whom the expressiveness and the beauty of the human structure
is all in all--drapery is a means of rendering the masses and the
movement of the figure more apparent than they would be in the nude. In
such works as these it is a thing beautiful in itself, for its own
ripple and flow and ordered intricacy. The figure is there beneath
the drapery, but the drapery is expressive of the mood of the artist and
of the sentiment of the work rather than especially explanatory of the
figure.
[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 24.--Saint-Gaudens. "Amor Caritas."]
First of all, by nature and by training, Saint-Gaudens was a designer,
and exquisiteness of design was the quality he most consciously strove
for--the quality on which he expended his unresting, unending,
persevering toil.
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