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Robert Shaw Memorial,
1884–1897
AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS
[1848–1907]
Augustus Saint Gaudens
• Augustus Saint-Gaudens was born in
Dublin, Ireland in 1848.
• The son of a shoemaker, Saint-Gaudens
moved with his family to New York when
he was an infant.
• Growing up in New York City, he became
interested in art, and after turning thirteen
he left school to apprentice with a cameo
cutter.
• While an apprentice, Saint-Gaudens took
classes at Cooper Union and the National
Academy of Design.
• When he was nineteen he moved to
Europe, where he continued his studies in
both Paris and Rome.
• Studying classical art and architecture,
Saint-Gaudens began to work as a
professional sculptor.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens by Kenyon Cox
• Returning to America, Saint-Gaudens
received his first major commission in New
York City.
• Still considered one of his important
works, “Admiral Farragut” (1881) stands in
New York’s Madison Square Park.
Admiral Farragut
• Combining the technical proficiency
learned in Europe with a free and flowing
hand, Saint-Gaudens created bronze
statues that represented the complexity
and grandeur of the American heroes he
portrayed.
• Saint-Gaudens was a master of the
human form, perfectly representing the
physical while bringing to life the
personality of his subjects.
• By the late 1880s and 1890s, SaintGaudens had produced some of his
greatest work including a copper statue of
Diana and the first of his bronze
monuments to President Abraham Lincoln.
• Throughout his career, he would continue
to work closely with architects, creating
most of his work specifically for specific
sites.
• Saint Gaudens’ work ranged from the
smallest, exquisite cameos to magnificent
outdoor memorials.
• He did portraits in low relief, high relief and
in the round, (the Robert Louis Stevenson
relief is a well known example;)
• He was commissioned by the rich, and did
loving portraits of intimate friends.
• He modeled in clay, cast in bronze,
worked in plaster, carved in stone.
The Robert Gould Shaw and the
Fifty-fourth Regiment Memorial,
• A monumental bronze relief sculpture
standing at the edge of Boston Common,
was begun twenty years after the end of
the Civil War and not completed for
another fourteen.
• It was an unusually complex project, but
the sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens,
came to regard it as a labor of love.
• The memorial had been commissioned by
a group of Bostonians to honor
Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the
privileged son of abolitionist parents, who
had given his life fighting for the Union
cause.
• Robert Gould Shaw was just 25 years old
when he was killed leading a regiment of
black soldiers into battle during the
American Civil War.
• Shaw was born into a wealthy Boston
family and attended Harvard University
before enlisting in the U.S. Army early in
the Civil War.
• After distinguishing himself in battle, Shaw
was picked to lead the 54th
Massachusetts, a regiment of black
soldiers raised following Abraham
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.
• Orator Frederick Douglass was instrumental in
helping to form the 54th Massachusetts, and his
own sons Lewis and Charles joined the
regiment.
• Shaw was made a colonel at age 25 and given
command of the 54th in February 1863.
• Five months later he and many of his men were
killed while storming Fort Wagner near
Charleston, South Carolina.
October 10, 1837 – July 18, 1863 (age 25)
• Robert Gould Shaw was not at first eager
to head this regiment;
• He declined the offer.
• After pressure from his mother, an ardent
abolitionist, and after some deep
reflection, he accepted the commission.
• Saint-Gaudens originally envisioned an
equestrian statue—the traditional hero on
horseback—but Shaw’s family objected to
the format as pretentious.
• The revised design presents the officer
riding beside a company of foot soldiers
marching toward their destiny.
• Saint Gaudens deals with the
conflict in war, and the ethics of a
nation.
• The Shaw Memorial
commemorates the first black
regiment of the Civil War, and
their white commander, Colonel
Robert Gould Shaw.
Did you see the movie…?
• The movie Glory is about this regiment
and the ethical struggles between black
and whites as well as North and South.
• The movie also portrays the change in
Shaw from superiority and aloofness
toward his men, to tremendous feeling and
bravery, as he led them into battle and
where he died alongside many of them.
• When the monument was at last unveiled
in 1897, the philosopher William James
observed that it was the first American
“soldier’s monument” dedicated to a group
of citizens united in the interests of their
country, rather than to a single military
hero.
• It was the first regiment of African
Americans recruited in the North for
service in the Union Army.
• Many of the volunteers had enlisted at the
urging of the black orator Frederick
Douglass, who believed (mistakenly, as it
turned out) that former slaves and others
of African descent would never be denied
the full privileges of citizenship if they
fought for those rights alongside white
Americans.
Frederick Douglass
• Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus
Washington Bailey, February 1818 – February
20, 1895) was an American social reformer,
orator, writer and statesman.
• After escaping from slavery, he became a leader
of the abolitionist movement, gaining renown for
his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery
writing.
• He stood as a living counter-example to
slaveholders' arguments that slaves did not have
the intellectual capacity to function as
independent American citizens.
• He became a major speaker for the cause of
abolition.
• In addition to his oratory, Douglass wrote
several autobiographies, eloquently
describing his life as a slave, and his
struggles to be free.
• His first autobiography, Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave, was published in 1845 and was his
best-known work, influential in gaining
support for abolition.
• He wrote two more autobiographies, with
his last, Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass, published in 1881 and covering
events through and after the Civil War.
• After the Civil War, Douglass remained
very active in America's struggle to reach
its potential as a "land of the free".
• Douglass actively supported women's
suffrage.
• Following the war, he worked on behalf of
equal rights for freedmen, and held
multiple public offices.
• Douglass was a firm believer in the
equality of all people, whether black,
female, Native American, or recent
immigrant.
• He was fond of saying, "I would unite with
anybody to do right and with nobody to do
wrong."
• Arming black soldiers in defense of the
Republic proved to be controversial and
the Fifty-fourth bore the additional burden
of having to prove its value.
• Frederick Douglass two sons, Lewis and
Charles were member of the Fifty-fourth.
• When war came in 1861, Shaw seemed to find a
purpose, and he immediately enlisted in the 7th
New York Infantry, and served in the defense of
Washington, DC for 30 days, after which the
regiment was dissolved. In May of that year,
Shaw joined the 2nd Massachusetts as a
second lieutenant, serving for two years and
attaining the rank of Captain.
•
• Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, a
strong abolitionist, recruited Shaw in March of
1863 to raise and command one of the first
regiments of African American troops in the
Union army, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry.
Initially taking the command to appease his
mother, Shaw eventually grew to respect his
men and believed that they could fight as well as
white soldiers.
• He was eager to get his men into action to prove
this. When he learned that black soldiers were to
receive less pay than whites, Shaw led a boycott
of all wages until the situation was changed.
• On May 28, 1863, Shaw led the 54th in a
triumphant parade through Boston to the
docks, where the regiment departed for
service in South Carolina.
• Shaw had married Annie Kneeland
Haggerty just 26 days before.
• Initially assigned to manual labor details,
the 54th did not see real action until a
skirmish with Confederate troops at James
Island on July 16.
• In the summer of 1863, Shaw’s regiment led an
audacious assault on Fort Wagner, South
Carolina.
• That fortress on Morris Island guarded
Charleston Harbor, the principal port of the
Confederacy, and was built on earthen parapets
that rose thirty feet above the beach.
• It had only one land-facing side, which
was bordered with a water-filled ditch ten
feet wide.
• Shaw’s battalions were already weakened
and exhausted when they approached
Fort Wagner on July 18, after a grueling
two-day march through driving rain.
• And as their commanding officer would
have known, the attack was doomed
before it began, for the Union troops were
overwhelmingly outnumbered by
Confederates.
• Nevertheless, Shaw rode into battle
flourishing his sword and shouting,
“Forward, Fifty-fourth!”
• Two days later, Shaw and his men were
among the units chosen to lead the
assault on Battery Wagner, part of the
defenses of Charleston. Shaw was killed
in the charge, bravely urging his men
forward, but the 54th had proven that they
were as brave as anyone, black or white.
• As he crested the ramparts, three enemy
bullets shot him down.
• His body was later stripped and thrown
with those of his troops into a mass grave.
• In the end, 281 soldiers and officers from
the unit were lost at Fort Wagner—killed or
never accounted for—and countless
others were injured.
• Confederate General Johnson Hagood refused to return
Shaw’s body to the Union army, and to show contempt
for the officer who led black troops, Hagood had Shaw’s
body buried in a common trench with his men.
• Rather than considering this a dishonor, Shaw’s father
proclaimed “We would not have his body removed from
where it lies surrounded by his brave and devoted
soldiers....We can imagine no holier place than that in
which he lies, among his brave and devoted followers,
nor wish for him better company – what a body-guard he
has!”
• The victorious Confederates buried him in a mass grave
with many of his men, an act they intended as an insult.
•
Following the battle, commanding Confederate General
Johnson Hagood returned the bodies of the other Union
officers who had died, but left Shaw's where it was.
• Hagood informed a captured Union surgeon that "had he
been in command of white troops, I should have given
him an honorable burial; as it is, I shall bury him in the
common trench with the negroes that fell with him."
• Although efforts were made to recover Shaw's body
(which had been stripped and robbed prior to burial),
Shaw's father publicly proclaimed that he was proud to
know that his son was interred with his troops, befitting
his role as a soldier and a crusader for social justice.
In a letter to the regimental surgeon, Lincoln
Stone, Frank Shaw wrote:
• We would not have his body removed from
where it lies surrounded by his brave and
devoted soldiers....We can imagine no
holier place than that in which he lies,
among his brave and devoted followers,
nor wish for him better company – what a
body-guard he has!
• Despite that dramatic defeat, the
Massachusetts Fifty-fourth had
successfully “established its reputation as
a fighting regiment.”
• In the words of one of its surviving officers,
Frederick Douglass’ son Lewis:
“Not a man flinched.”
• Reports of their extraordinary courage
rallied African Americans to the cause, and
Abraham Lincoln later surmised that the
additional manpower they supplied had
made the critical difference to the outcome
of the war.
• Like Shaw, Saint Gaudens also struggled
with his ethics even as he worked on this
sculpture.
• Years later, he admitted that initially he
took the commission for this monument,
not out of deep feeling for the subject, but
to make money and further his career.
• The future sculptor as a young boy in New
York, during the Civil War, had seen race
riots and he could not forget them.
• His own father had also been an
abolitionist.
• He worked on this monument for more
than 17 years with an intense desire to be
fair to these men, their meaning and their
individual courage.
• The dignity of every man is respected.
Allegory
• Saint-Gaudens symbolized this paradoxical
military episode in which defeat gives rise to
victory with the winged figure that hovers in low
relief above the soldiers;
• she carries poppies, traditional emblems of
death and remembrance, and an olive branch
for victory and peace.
• Apart from that concession to allegory,
Saint-Gaudens worked in a realistic style.
• If the portrait of Shaw appears idealized,
his rigid posture and resolute gaze
nonetheless accord with contemporary
accounts of his brave demeanor as he
entered battle like a sacrificial lamb.
• More remarkable is the stoic procession of
soldiers, portrayed not as cogs in the
machinery of war but as individuals
participating in a moral crusade.
• In a time when African Americans were
usually depicted as generic types, SaintGaudens searched out models and
produced some forty portrait-heads in
clay, even though he used only sixteen
in the sculpture itself.
• The ragged uniforms of the recruits are
each disheveled in a different way—not to
undermine the soldier’s gallantry, as some
have argued, but to recall their long and
dreary trudge to Charleston Harbor.
• “There they march,” said William James,
“warm-blooded champions of a better day
for man.”
• Their baggy uniforms, and the horse are
weighty, substantial. But there is lightness
too, even gaiety, in the spiky guns rising
up.
• The drama of opposing diagonals—the
forward moving legs of the men and horse
and the backward thrust of the guns—
work to move the men forward; and their
faces are thoughtful as they go into battle.
• Unlike most heroic sculpture, this
monument is placed close to the earth and
walking by, you cannot help but become
part of the march to justice. Saint
Gaudens, visually, enlists us in the army of
ethics.
• Your eyes cannot skim across this
procession of sameness and difference;
you go up and down with man and animal,
white and black—all in bronze.
• Each face is given individuality.
• Located on Boston Commons, St.
Gaudens’ bronze relief sculpture, in a
setting designed by architect Charles
McKim, is eleven feet high by fourteen feet
wide.
• With an angel above pointing the way and
Shaw riding a horse, the group of men,
portrayed almost life size, march proudly
along, carrying their guns on their
shoulders—not in behalf of cruelty but to
fight the injustice of slavery.
• In 1982, sixty-two names of African
American soldiers who gave their lives at
Fort Wagner were inscribed on the base of
the Shaw Memorial.
Other work of August Saint
Gaudens
Robert Louis Stevenson
American Eagle gold bullion coins
that were instituted in 1986
The Adams Memorial
Marian "Clover" Hooper Adams
• Adams advised Saint-Gaudens to
contemplate iconic images from Buddhist
devotional art. One such subject,
Kwannon (also known as Guan Yin, the
Bodhisattva of compassion), is frequently
depicted as a seated figure draped in
cloth.
• find a drum
• Where are the flags?
• The drum is on the far right.
• The flags are on the left, behind the rifles.
• look closely at the individual faces.
• Which ones wear mustaches and beards?
• How are the foot soldiers dressed?
• What do they carry on their backs?
• What else do they carry?
• Compare the foot soldiers’ dress with
Colonel Shaw’s.
• What does Shaw hold?
• They wear caps, long-sleeve shirts, shoes,
and long pants, and they carry canteens.
• They shoulder bed rolls and packs.
They also carry rifles.
• Both wear caps with visors, but the foot
soldiers’ hats are more wrinkled. Shaw
wears a long jacket and boots.
• What does Shaw hold? He holds a sword
in one hand and his horse’s reins in the
other.
• Discuss how artists can create rhythm in
works of visual art.
• How did Saint-Gaudens create a sense of
rhythm in this relief?
• He repeated the slant of leg and body
lines and shapes at regular intervals
across the sculpture.
• (Even the horse’s legs match the slant of
the marching soldiers’ legs.)
• The repeated rifles create a steady rhythm
in the top half of the sculpture.
• Only Shaw’s upright form and his horse’s
neck interrupt the steady march across the
sculpture.
• How did Saint-Gaudens create a sense of
depth in this sculpture?
• Soldiers who are closer to us stand out
farther from the background; they are in
greater relief.
• How do you know that some soldiers are
closer to viewers than others?
• The soldiers at the back are in low relief.
• The closer forms also overlap the more
distant ones.
• Which figure is closest to the viewer in
highest relief?
• Colonel Robert Shaw
Essay Question 1
• Who is in command?
• How do you know?
Essay Question 2
• This was commissioned to honor and
remember Robert Shaw, but who else
does it commemorate?
Essay Question 3
• Why was this monument made of bronze
rather than marble or wood?
Essay Question 4
• What does the winged figure in the sky
hold?
• What do you think this figure in the sky
represents? Why?