Diane was the only feminine nude sculpted by Saint-Gaudens and was a key work in New York art at the end of the 19th century. As from 1886, the sculptor started making the studies for her. The first version shows the work with floating drapery. Erected on the Tower in Madison Square Garden in New York in the fashion of a weathervane, she was illuminated at night by use of electricity. In 1892 she was thought to be too voluminous and was removed. Once reworked in a more slender style, the nude was to find her original place in 1894. Finally, Diane was exhibited at the museum in Philadelphia after the tower burned in 1925. This work proved to be enormously popular and numerous reductions were cast at the beginning of the 1890s with the Diane presented balancing on a sphere or on a pedestal.
Between 1881 and 1883, the artist received commissions for sculpted decoration for the Villard Houses on Madison Avenue in New York and for the house of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, situated on 5th Avenue. Saint-Gaudens worked in particular on the latter for which he created a group of four wooden polychrome panels, inspired by a fresco from Pompeii, with caryatids and relief portraits representing the Vanderbilt family.
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