A portrait of the artist’s wife

By Glynis Hart
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CORNISH— Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens won fame and fortune, and his picturesque home and gardens in Cornish were a magnet for artists during his lifetime. Since his death the grounds at Saint-Gaudens Historical Site have been a public resource, allowing visitors a glimpse into the artists’ life and providing a green-lawned display case for some of his works.

But the woman who made the park possible has been in the shadows. “Augusta Homer Saint-Gaudens: Stepping Out of the Shadows,” an exhibition introducing the sculptor’s wife, is on view at the park through Sept. 2.

Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1848, Augusta Fisher Homer, daughter of a well-to-do merchant, was third cousin to painter Winslow Homer. At the time, the women of bustling, cosmopolitan Boston were making news; the Boston-bred Elizabeth Cady Stanton, finding herself in the wilds of Upstate New York, organized the first Women’s Rights Convention the year Augusta was born.

Although few women had the temerity and the family support to pursue a career in the arts, Augusta, unmarried at 26, was studying painting in Rome when she met her future husband, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Her parents were alarmed and sent their daughter to the Azores to put some distance between her and the young sculptor. They only gave consent to the marriage two years later, after Saint-Gaudens received his first major commission, to create a monument to Admiral David Farragut—a sculpture which still stands in Madison Square in Manhattan.

Whatever her aspirations may have been – artists like Berthe Morisot and Elizabeth Vigée LeBrun were succeeding in the art world— in addition to societal expectations that confounded and thwarted women in the field, Augusta had her own handicap, which was deafness. Some writers hold that her deafness “worsened” as she got older, so it could not have been complete, but it may have caused her difficulty communicating with other people.

The exhibit at Saint-Gaudens Historic site offers some of “Gussie’s” own works, tools and personal effects in order to give a more rounded portrait of Augusta. Her correspondence is preserved in the Dartmouth College’s Rauner Special Collections Library, where curator Henry Duffy and other park staff sought a better understanding of Augusta’s character and life.

The ten paintings of Augusta’s on exhibit are “largely factual,” according to curator Duffy: landscapes and still lifes. At the time, these were the only subjects considered proper for women: women artists were excluded from schools and art studios, on the grounds that they were considered the weaker sex – incapable of genius—as well as objects of, or prey to temptation. They were not allowed to go out in the street without a chaperone. Learning to draw the human figure from nudes, as male artists were trained, was simply not allowed them.

Augusta is said to have kept to the side of the sculptor’s busy life and concerned herself with running the household and keeping the accounts. She gave birth to a son, Homer, in 1880. Visitors to the painter’s home found “Gussie,” as she was called, off-putting. When she discovered Saint-Gaudens was having an affair (by which another child was born) she left him and went traveling.

Taking her sister or her son for company, Augusta traveled to the Arctic Circle, to the Sahara and the Middle East. She and Augustus continued to write to one another; after the sculptor was diagnosed with cancer in 1900, they got back together and settled in what had been their summer home in Cornish. Augusta managed the studio, correspondence and household accounts until Saint-Gaudens’ death of cancer in 1907. After that, she set about securing his legacy and making the Cornish home, which they called “Aspet” a site for visitors and art lovers.

In 1919 Augusta established the Saint-Gaudens Memorial, having invested her husband’s income wisely. Before agreeing to bequeath ownership of the site to the memorial, she pushed the memorial to raise $100,000.

This year the park marks the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the memorial. The ownership of the property transferred to the memorial upon Augusta’s death in 1926.