Augustus Saint-Gaudens 1848 - 1907

Robert Louis Stevenson
Isobel Strong (his step-daughter), Santa Barbara, California (sold: Anderson Auction Company, New York, November 24, 1914)
George D. Smith, New York (acquired at the above sale)
George Hewitt Myers, Washington D.C.,1915 (acquired from the above) 
Bequest to the Textile Museum from the above

John H. Dryfhout, "Robert Louis Stevenson," Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1975, pp. 187-200
John H. Dryfhout, The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1982, no. 133, p. 174, illustrations of other examples p. 175
Augustus Saint Gaudens 1848-1907: A Master of American Sculpture, Musée des Augustins, Toulouse, France; Musée National de la Coopération Franco-Américaine, Château de Blérancourt, France (in cooperation with the Saint Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire), no. 66, pp. 164-65, illustration of another example

This bronze portrait medallion of Robert Louis Stevenson documents the friendship and mutual esteem of two titans of nineteenth century arts and letters – Augustus Saint Gaudens (1848-1907), and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). Saint Gaudens, born in Dublin, and Stevenson, born in Edinburgh, met in New York City in 1887, introduced by their mutual friend, the painter, Will Low (1853-1932). Saint Gaudens had admired Stevenson since reading New Arabian Nights (1882) and was eager to celebrate the author by executing a bas relief.

In 1887, both men enjoyed a flood tide of creative energy and public esteem. Saint Gaudens was the acclaimed sculptor of the monument to Civil War hero Admiral David Farragut installed in Madison Square Park, at that time, the center of New York's theater and hotel district. He had recently completed Lincoln, The Man (1884-1887, Lincoln Park, Chicago) and The Puritan (1883-1886, Springfield, Massachusetts) which was dedicated in 1887.  In his studio, he was embarking on commissions for the Shaw Memorial (1884-1897, Boston), and the Adams Memorial (1885-1891, Rock Creek Church Cemetery, Washington, D. C.). At the same time he modeled Stevenson he was also working on a bust of General William T. Sherman that was the forerunner of his later equestrian statue of the general at the southeastern edge of Central Park. Stevenson was amazed to find himself a celebrity upon his arrival in New York.  Already the author of  A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), Treasure Island (1883), and Kidnapped (1886), his instant fame accrued from a stage adaptation of the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde (1886) which was playing to great popular success on Broadway.

The sittings took place in five sessions at the Albert Hotel at University Place and West 11^th Street where Stevenson was staying en route to Dr. Trudeau's tuberculosis retreat in New York's Adirondacks Mountains. The men became instant and fast friends, despite the marked difference in their physical circumstances. Stevenson was a lifelong invalid, often bedridden, while Saint Gaudens lived in a whirlwind of energy with a deserved reputation as a man about town in company with his friend and sometime collaborator, Stanford White. But the vigorous life of adventure that Stevenson lived through literature struck an empathetic emotional chord with Saint Gaudens and the two sustained a long-distance relationship until Stevenson's sudden death in 1894. After their first meeting Stevenson told Will Low: "I like your sculptor, what a splendid straightforward and simple fellow he is, and handsome as well," while Saint Gaudens confided to Low that he found Stevenson "astonishingly young, not a bit like an invalid, and a bully fellow." Saint Gaudens later wrote in a letter to Low that "my episode with Stevenson has been one of the [very happy] events of my life. . . . I am in . . . [a] beatific state." (Saint Gaudens, p. 384) (Low, p. 389). In a similar fervor of religious terminology, Stevenson later addressed Saint Gaudens as "My dear God-like Sculptor" (letter of May 19, 1893, p. 385).  

Saint Gaudens depicted Stevenson as he found him, in his typical working mode, sitting up in bed and holding a cigarette. The elegiac poem inscribed on the medallion in letters that Saint Gaudens hand modeled is from Stevenson's 1887 poetry collection Underwoods, Book 1: In English, xi entitled "To Will H. Low." It begins "Youth now flees on feathered foot," and ends "Where hath fleeting beauty led? /  To the Doorway of the Dead. / Life is over, life was gay. / We have come the primrose way." Homer Saint-Gaudens, who edited, organized  (and sanitized) his father's memoir, observed that "the medallion of Stevenson was probably one of the most popular works my father created, and as the demand for it continued without interruption, Saint Gaudens remodeled it in a number of forms. . . . [but] he would never have troubled to carry this development so far had it not been for that tremendous admiration. . . ." (p. 384). The final iteration of Saint Gaudens' design is a large rectangular relief commissioned for the Stevenson memorial in The Church of Saint Giles, Edinburgh, Scotland. For this last version, the cigarette in Stevenson's hand became a more church-appropriate if less truthful pencil and the poem was changed to Stevenson's well-known "Requiem," which concludes "Home is the sailor, home from sea, /  And the Hunter home from the hill."

While Saint Gaudens conscientiously attempted to personalize many of the bronzes produced during his own lifetime, playing slight variations on design, the present bronze arguably enjoys pride of place among the large family of Stevenson bronzes. It was one of only three cast in this size before 1900, one for Benjamin Cable, a collector; one for Stevenson's good friend and biographer, Sidney Colvin; and one for Stevenson himself. Stevenson requested these latter two bronzes in a letter to Saint Gaudens of May 29, 1893: "I wish . . . a couple of copies of my medallion, as gilt-edged and high-toned as it is possible to make them. One is for our house here. . . . The other is for Sidney Colvin. . . ." (Ibid, p. 385). Saint Gaudens arranged for the castings from the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company, a foundry located a few blocks away from the sculptor's own studio. Stevenson recounted the arrival of the medallion in a letter of July 8, 1894 to Saint Gaudens:

This is to tell you that the medallion has been at last triumphantly transported up the hill and placed over my smoking room mantelpiece. It is considered by everybody a first-rate but flattering portrait. We have it in a very good light, which brings out the artistic merit of the God-like sculptor to great advantage. . . .  The verses . . . look remarkably well." (p. 388)

This bronze, dated 1893, descended in Stevenson's family. It belonged to Stevenson's widow, and then to Isobel Strong (1858-1953), Stevenson's step-daughter who served as his secretary in the author's final years in Samoa. George Hewitt Myers purchased it in 1915 from George D. Smith, a New York City book dealer, who had acquired both the bronze and the John Singer Sargent oil painting of Robert Louis Stevenson at the Isobel Strong Sale, held by Strong following her mother's death, at Anderson Auction Company in November of 1914. Myers' fortune derived from his family share of the Bristol-Myers Company and he was an avid collector of Robert Louis Stevenson material, eventually donating the majority of his collection to Yale's Beinecke Library.  In 1915, he commissioned the architect John Russell Pope to build a home in Washington, D.C.'s Embassy Row which not only functioned as a residence for Myers and his wife, but became the location of The Textile Museum which they founded in 1925. This plaque was hanging on the wall of the museum at the time of its inception.

Saint Gaudens' Stevenson bronze continues its popularity into the twenty first century. Versions are held in major museum collections all over the United States as well as in England and France.