• View Zoomable Image

• 19th Century American Sculpture

• Diana , 1894
• bronze on green marble base
• 33 in. x 17 1/2 in. x 5 1/2 in. (83.82 cm x 44.45 cm x 13.97 cm)

• Augustus Saint-Gaudens  (1848 - 1907)
• American
• E. Gruet
• French

• Bequest of Katherine H. Faulkner, 1977.55

• On View

  *Please double-check with the museum before visiting to view a specific object, as the galleries are often changed faster than Collections Online can be updated.

Interpretive text from Exploring American Art: An Online Resource for the American Collections

Augustus Saint-Gaudens was at the height of his career in 1886 when he completed the head of his model and mistress Davida Clark (d. 1910).  The marble bust, about half life-size, showing the sitter with her hair drawn back in a Grecian knot, would be an inspiration.  Soon he had made a small sketch of the mythological Diana, the final sculpture of which would serve as the finial/weathervane of his friend and architect Stanford White's Madison Square Garden Tower.

Stanford White (1853-1906) was inspired by the Giralda Tower in Seville, Spain (which also had a weathervane at the top), when he designed the new Madison Square Garden for New York City.  Saint Gaudens modeled an eighteen-hundred-pound Diana for him, which, at eighteen feet high was installed three hundred forty-seven feet above the ground on the cream-colored brick tower in October 1891.  Once in place, the figure proved to be too large.  At their own expense, the sculptor and architect removed it, and Saint-Gaudens remodeled the piece, making changes in the drapery (which acted as a rudder) and repositioning the spherical mount.  The new copper-gilded figure, thirteen feet high, was installed on top of the Madison Square Tower in 1893.  As it was mounted on ball bearings, a wind pressure of one-quarter pound to the square foot was sufficient to move the now fifteen-hundred-pound figure.  On opening night, lighted by sixty-six hundred incandescent lamps, and with ten giant carbon arc spotlights trained on it, the first lighted sculpture of its time was especially dramatic to the pedestrians below and the patrons of the roof garden restaurant and nightclub above.

The popularity of Diana is recalled in the many cartoons, photographs, and verses that it inspired.  Edward Cary described it in Century Magazine in 1894 as "the first generous tribute to pure beauty erected within the careless sight of busy New York."  The figure remained in place until 1925, when the New York Life Insurance Company replaced Madison Square Garden.  The sculpture was dismantled, and in 1931 it was given to the new Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it was installed at the top of the main staircase.

Saint-Gaudens was urged by both his French artist friends as well as Stanford White to begin an edition of his Diana in a reduced version.  The first casts of Saint-Gaudens's Diana, on a half-sphere with bow, arrow, and string, were thirty-one inches high.  These were cast in bronze in New York City by the Aubry Brothers Foundry.  A smaller version, with only the bow, remodeled from the early sketch, was twenty-one inches high, mounted on a full sphere that sat on a low, square tiered base, also of bronze.  Saint-Gaudens used the Gruet foundry in Paris for these casts.  Located at 44 Avenue de Chatillon, Gruet was the foundry that Saint-Gaudens used for the Farragut Monument (1900-01) and the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial (1901-03, St. Giles Church, Edinburgh).  Gruet also cast the reductions of the Frederick MacMonnies (q.v.) Diana.  The editions were sold through Tiffany and Co. in New York City and Paris and Doll & Richards Gallery in Boston, as well as through the studio of the sculptor.  He presented his wife, Augusta, with a cast of the twenty-one-inch version on Christmas 1894.  A copyright was registered in January 1895 for the Diana of the Tower.  These editions were not limited nor were they numbered.  Saint-Gaudens sold the larger version for $200 and the smaller versions for $150 each.

The Currier's cast represents the twenty-one-inch version on a sphere, with the whole mounted on a marble-cube base.  This cast was a gift from the sculptor's widow in 1916 on the occasion of the wedding of Katherine Kingsbury to Philip Faulkner in Keene, New Hampshire.  Augusta Saint-Gaudens enlisted Faulkner as a founder and secretary/treasurer of the Saint-Gaudens Memorial in Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1919.

In 1899, while Saint-Gaudens was in Paris, he renewed his interest in the production of the editions of his sculpture.  He developed a new base for the Diana; the full sphere was retained and he remodeled the bow, incorporating both a string and arrow into the ensemble, which was mounted on a Renaissance-style tripod with winged griffins.

After Saint-Gaudens's death, his widow copyrighted an edition of reductions of the bust of the Diana, which was remodeled from the smaller version with a slight change in the hairstyle.  The remodeling was probably done by the sculptor's brother, Louis Saint-Gaudens (1854-1913), and the changes were also included in a continued
casting of the editions mounted on the tripod base.

JHD

REFERENCES


John H. Dryfhout.  "Augustus Saint-Gaudens" in Jeanne Wasserman, ed., Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, 1975), pp. 181-218.

John H. Dryfhout.  The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens.  Hanover, NH:  University Press of New England, 1982.