Monumental Experiences: A Classroom Application of American Sculpture

James Percoco

So too, in the years after the Civil War, former Union and Confederate soldiers and their families similarly sought to deal with their grief and pain.  In the years between the Civil War and World War I, many sculptors created a plethora of monuments both above and below the Mason-Dixon Line for veterans groups and individuals.  Utilizing two specific monuments—one in a public setting (the Boston Commons) and the other in a more intimate setting (Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts)—this lesson is designed for American history or American Studies students.

Eighteen miles away in Concord, just inside the gates of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, another angel, this one in marble, gazes down reflectively at the decorative tablets dedicated to Samuel, Asa, and John Melvin. Mourning Victory, created by sculptor Daniel Chester French, represents the embodiment of national and personal loss of three brothers who were killed in the same conflict that took the lives of Shaw and his men.

Each monument documents and recalls the lives and heroism of those who perished for a cause that they held dear to their hearts.  Each visitor to these separate memorials experiences different emotions.  These emotions are drawn out successfully by the skill of the artists, clearly a tribute to the communicative process carried out so carefully by the sculptor’s touch.

A nationwide push to celebrate heroes and heroines of the Civil War characterized this era in America.  City parks and cemeteries were decorated with bronze or marble figures through the generosity of either memorial committees, as in the case of the Shaw, or through private individuals, as in the case of the Melvin (Mourning Victory). 

Private patrons and memorial associations eagerly sought after Saint-Gaudens and French to embellish the physical environment of their communities by communicating stories of past individuals and deeds.  Saint-Gaudens was considered the master of portrait allegory sculpture, while French was the dean of allegory sculpture.  Both men made important contributions to the collective conscience of a nation struggling to bind the wounds of civil war.  Each artist sculpted his respective work with care, sensitivity, and patience so as not to disappoint the patron.  Saint-Gaudens’s Shaw (1884-1897), most satisfying to the Shaw Memorial Committee (despite fourteen years of waiting), became a “Symphony in Bronze,” while French’s Mourning Victory (1906-1908) went far beyond what the patron, James Melvin, had expected (1). 

With regard to the Shaw, Dryfhout writes: 

The figures on this bronze tablet are cast in very high relief, with a free-standing equestrian portrait of Colonel Robert G. Shaw centrally placed in the foreground.  Colonel Shaw, in campaign uniform and fatigue cap is astride the horse, directed and looking right.  He holds a sword in his right hand.  On the tablet are ranks of marching black soldiers who hold rifles over their shoulders.  They are preceded by a drummer boy.  The allegorical figure above them is clothed in floating drapery.  Branches of laurel extend from her bent right arm and her extended left hand holds traditional poppies (symbolic of sleep or death) (2). 

On 31 May 1897, The Shaw Memorial was unveiled with much pomp and fanfare.  Speakers included Governor Wolcott of Massachusetts and Booker T. Washington.  Additionally, sixty-five veterans of the assault on Fort Wagner participated in the dedication.  The work was a phenomenal success both within the community and artistic circles.  Robert Gould Shaw’s mother, who was active in the affairs of the Memorial Committee, commented, “Saint-Gaudens has immortalized my native city, he has immortalized my dear son, and he has immortalized himself.”  A contemporary of Saint-Gaudens, noted art critic, sculptor, and sculpture historian Lorado Taft remarked in his text Modern Tendencies in Sculpture, “A man who could labor upon a work like the Shaw for fourteen years, fairly loving it into noble perfection, has a right to leave the result to time and to the work itself.”  The artist himself said, “That anything I have done should have suggested the inspired and inspiring ode . . .  makes all the great strain and love gone to the making of the Shaw worthwhile, and I have not lived entirely in vain” (3).

Clearly, Saint-Gaudens and his image have communicated much to successive generations, as the Shaw has inspired poets, such as Robert Lowell in his “Ode To The Union Dead,” composers such as Charles Ives, who incorporated a piece on the Shaw in his musical composition, Three Places in New England, and more recently, Edward Zwick, who produced the Hollywood motion picture Glory.

Although Daniel Chester French’s Melvin Memorial sits in a less public setting, it nevertheless evokes a sentiment similar to that found in the Shaw.  According to Richman, the Melvin is “one of French’s masterpieces, his finest ideal monument and surely his finest war monument honoring three brothers—Asa, John, and Samuel Melvin—who as members of Company K, First Massachusetts Heavy Artillery died in the Civil War.  A majestic female angel engulfed in stone peers gracefully down on three slate tablets commemorating the deceased” (4). 

The monument was commissioned by James Melvin, the youngest brother in the family.  For a fitting and permanent tribute to his kin, he sought out the Concord native, French, who with the death of Saint-Gaudens in 1907, became the preeminent American sculptor.  Craven states that the Melvin is “unlike earlier Civil War monuments.”  Generally speaking, aside from the Shaw, most Civil War monuments were 

bronze tributes to fallen heroes usually in the portrait style chosen to stand over the graves or anonymous portrait statues of soldiers or sailors for public squares.  French however carried the image of a mourning nation, grieving over the loss of her fine men, to its highest pinnacle of expressiveness within the scope of the personifying figure and academic idealism.  A monumental maiden, whose torso and arms are undraped emerges from a prismatic block.  There is an Art Nouveau element in the swirling curvilinear design of her hair, the shroudlike American flag about her head, and the draperies at her side.  Her expression is one of deep sorrow, not openly displayed.  In her right hand she holds up a laurel branch, for she represents Victory, but a victory saddened by the loss of three young men.  As a boy French had known the four Melvin brothers and he invested the monument with considerable personal feeling (5).

French’s work was considered such an exceptional piece that in 1915 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York requested that the sculptor duplicate the work for their collection.  Having secured the permission of the patron, French did indeed create a replication of Mourning Victory for the Metropolitan where it stands today in testimony to both the artist and the ideal.

This background discussion has focused on the sculptural units of both the Shaw and the Melvin.  It has not treated the architectural rendering significant to each piece.  Significantly, two leading architects of the time worked with both Saint-Gaudens and French.  Charles F. McKim of the famed firm of McKim, Meade, and White designed the setting for the Shaw, while architect Henry Bacon, who would later collaborate with French on the design of the Lincoln Memorial, designed the setting for the Melvin.

1. Burke Wilkinson, Uncommon Clay: The Life and Works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (San Diego: Harcourt Brace       Jovanovich, 1985), 274. 
2. John Dryfhout, The Works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Han-over: University of New England Press, 1982), 222. 
3. Lorado Taft, Modern Tendencies in Sculpture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1921), 1. 
4. Michael Richman, Daniel Chester French: An American Sculptor (Washington: Preservation Press, 1976), 113. 
5. Wayne Craven, Sculpture in America (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984), 402. 

*Brooklyn Museum.  The American Renaissance, 1876-1917.  New York: Pantheon Books, 1979. 

Craven, Wayne.  Sculpture in America.  Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984.

Cresson, Margaret French.  Journey into Fame: The Life of Daniel Chester French.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947.

*Dryfhout, John.  The Works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens.  Hanover: University of New England Press, 1982.

French, Mary.  Memories of a Sculptor’s Wife.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928.

*Greenthal, Kathryn.  Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Master Sculptor.  Boston: G.K. Hall, 1985.

*Richman, Michael.  Daniel Chester French: An American Sculptor.  Washington: Preservation Press, 1976. 

Saint-Gaudens, Homer. The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens.  New York: Century, 1913. 

Taft, Lorado. The History of American Sculpture.  New York: Macmillan, 1924. 

Wilkinson, Burke. Uncommon Clay: The Life and Works of Augustus Saint Gaudens.  San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.

James A. Percoco teaches at West Springfield High School in Springfield, Virginia.