Even though he lived and worked in the United States, Augustus Saint-Gaudens inherited a European culture. He was born on 1st march 1848 in Dublin, of an Irish mother, Mary McGuiness and of a French father, Bernard Saint-Gaudens, from Aspet - a small village at the foot of the Pyrenees.
Much later on, in 1891, the sculptor discovered Cornish in New Hampshire, where he was reminded very much of the landscape of the Pyrenees. He bought a farm here, which he named "Aspet". In 1900, on a journey in the Pyrenees, Augustus Saint-Gaudens said: "It is impossible for me to describe my emotions on arriving in this village which I had heard so much about from my father (...) I am sure that the unique feeling of being at home, in a place where I have never been before, comes from memories transferred to me by my father".
When the Saint-Gaudens family emigrated to the United States in 1848, the father, a cobbler, founded a boutique on arriving in New York; a shoe shop that was baptised "Aux Dames de France". At the age of thirteen, Augustus Saint-Gaudens expressed his desire "to become an artist and nothing else". He became an apprentice in the studios of Louis Avet and Jules Le Brethon, French cameo sculptors who had settled in New York. At the age of nine, Saint-Gaudens left for Paris to study at the École des beaux-arts in the studio of François Jouffroy where he stayed for three years among French artists, in particular, Antonin Mercié. He had a lasting friendship with Mercié and they both went on to continue their training in Rome. Here, Saint-Gaudens accomplished his first work, Hiawatha.
On returning to the United States in 1875, the sculptor helped found the Society of American Artists whose aim was "to modernise New York's artistic life". Here he met the architects Stanford White and Charles McKim with whom he would collaborate for some of the pedestals on his monuments and many of the frames on his bas-reliefs. The career of Augustus Saint-Gaudens was just taking off.
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