Augustus Saint-Gaudens is considered to be among the greatest of American sculptors. He grew up in New York City. In 1861, at age thirteen, he was apprenticed to Louis Avet (active mid-nineteenth century), a French cameo cutter. From 1864 to 1867 Saint-Gaudens worked in New York as a cameo cutter, attending drawing classes at the Cooper Union and later at the National Academy of Design. In Paris in 1867 he studied drawing in preparation for his admission the following year to the studio of François Jouffroy (1806-1882) in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 he went to Rome and worked as a sculptor, very gradually obtaining patronage. In September 1872 he visited New York, returning to Rome early the following year. From 1875 to 1877 he was involved in decorative sculptural projects in New York but also received other important commissions. In 1877 he married and returned to Europe.

Saint-Gaudens was among the founders of the Society of American Artists in New York in 1877. Beginning in 1880 he worked almost continuously in New York and after 1891 also at his summer home and studio at Cornish, New Hampshire. During this period he was widely recognized as the greatest living American sculptor and received many of his most important commissions. A retrospective memorial exhibition was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the year after his death.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Royal Cortissoz, Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907) § Homer Saint-Gaudens, ed., The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaud ens, 2 vols. (1913; reprint, in The Art Experience in Late Nineteenth-Century America Series, ed. H. Barbara Weinberg, New York: Garland, 1976), with chronological list of works by the artist § Louise Hall Tharp, Saint-Gaudens and the Gilded Age (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969) § John H. Dryfhout, The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982), with catalogue raisonné, bibliography, appendixes listing studio assistants, works by Louis Saint-Gaudens, works in public collections, and works misattributed to Saint-Gaudens, discussion of Saint-Gaudens Memorial in Cornish, N.H. § New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Master Sculptor, exh. cat., 1985, text by Kathryn Greenthal, with bibliography.