The sculpture of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), called the American Michelangelo, has often been compared to the magnificent works of the Renaissance. As an advocate of new ideas and a new approach to sculpture, Saint-Gaudens played a preeminent role in developing America's cultural life and revitalizing the art of sculpture in the modern age. (1861-65), when numerous monuments were commissioned to commemorate the national crisis and subsequent unification. In addition, the amassing of private fortunes during the country's unprecedented economic and financial growth led to an interest in sculpture for personal collections. Saint-Gaudens contributed works of both types. His Shaw Memorial (1897), commemorating the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment, the first U.S. Army unit of African Americans, and his Lincoln Monument (1887) are among the most moving of the nation's Civil War monuments, while his Adams Memorial (1891) is one of the most evocative of his privately commissioned works. France and spent eight years in Europe, where he found a freer and bolder form of artistic expression. On his return to the United States in 1875, he used his European training to create a new American style incorporating simplicity of subject, realism of form, and strength of emotion. In addition to his monuments, his works also included interior decoration for some of the great houses of the Gilded Age, portrait reliefs, and medals and U.S. coinage. his and the subsequent generation of American sculptors through his teaching and his lead in establishing organizations for the support and training of American artists, including the Society of American Artists. His legacy, as both artist and educator, is nothing less than the shaping of American culture.

Arguably the greatest American sculptor, Augustus Saint Gaudens (1848-1907) left a rich legacy of artwork including public monuments such as the Adams Memorial in Washington, D.C., the Sherman Monument in Manhattan and perhaps his greatest work, the Shaw Memorial in Boston, honoring Col. Robert Gould Shaw and the famed Massachusetts 54th Regiment of African American volunteers. Saint Gaudens also created wonderful portrait reliefs and medals and is especially known for his design of the 1907 twenty-dollar gold piece, considered America's most beautiful coin. This eminently readable biography, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1986, provides a full and accurate portrait of the man and his times. Solid, well-researched and absorbing, The Life and Works of Augustus Saint Gaudens offers a lively depiction of this talented man who rose from humble origins to success as one of the most important of American artists.

"The Metropolitan Museum of Art has some forty-five sculptures by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), the American Beaux-Arts sculptor who worked in New York, Paris, and Cornish, New Hampshire. The Museum’s collection fully represents the range of his oeuvre—from early cameos to innovative painterly bas-reliefs to reductions after public monuments for East Coast cities. Through the lens of the Museum's unparalleled holdings as well as some related loans, this exhibition offers a reappraisal of Saint-Gaudens's groundbreaking role in the history of late nineteenth-century American sculpture and the Aesthetic Movement."--The Metropolitan Museum of Art web site