Compiling his
Reminiscences in the final years of his life, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) recalled how the coming of America’s Civil War had moved him. Saint-Gaudens had been an aspiring artist, aged 13, and a New York cameo-cutter’s apprentice when the war’s first shots were fired; from the lathe where he learned to cut lions, dogs, and horses into amethyst and malachite, he watched the Federal army gather. ‘From my window,’ he wrote, ‘I saw virtually the entire contingent of New England Volunteers on their way to the Civil War, a spectacle profoundly impressive, even to my youthful imagination.’ Amid strains of abolitionist song, and the marching of feet, one silhouette loomed in his memory: ‘above all, what remains in my mind is seeing in a procession the figure of a tall and very dark man, seeming entirely out of proportion in his height with the carriage in which he was driven, bowing to the crowds on each side. […] the man was Abraham Lincoln on his way to Washington.’ Looking back over decades, the artist’s practised eye picks out Lincoln’s exceptional form, those peculiar proportions that Saint-Gaudens would render in bronze. It also rests on his younger self as sculptor-in-the-making: as the turn of his lathe followed the turn of national events, the newly acquired movements of the young cameo-cutter’s hands found their rhythm in the tramp of soldierly boots and presidential processions.