STAN AND GUS
- Cornelia Brooke Gilder
- Jul 22
- 8 min read
Updated: Jul 24
HENRY WIENCEK TO TALK ABOUT HIS NEW BOOK ON ARCHITECT STANFORD WHITE AND SCULPTOR AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS
By Cornelia Brooke Gilder
“If I could,” wrote distraught client Henry Adams after four years of delays and prevarications on the memorial to his wife, Clover, "I should club Saint-Gaudens and Stanford White, and put them under their own structure.”
Adams was in Tahiti, and in his travels, he learned of an ancient Hawaiian custom of human sacrifice before construction of a venerated structure. Two more years would pass before he would see the magnificent memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.—Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ bronze hooded figure on Stanford White’s high stone base and landscaped enclosure.
For the rest of his life, when in Washington, the bereft historian Adams would walk up to this sacred spot daily to view Saint-Gaudens’ mysterious, calming figure from the viewpoint of White’s broken-curved stone bench. Together, Saint-Gaudens and White had created what a contemporary critic described as ”the most beautiful thing ever fashioned by the hand of man on this continent.”
This is one such compelling story Henry Wiencek tells in his forthcoming Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age, which will be released July 22. The following week, on July 30, Weincek will talk about the new book at The Mount as part of a new series titled “Building Old New York,” which delves into the history and legacy of some of New York City's most iconic institutions, spaces, and landmarks.
Stan and Gus is a tale of synergy and serendipity between White, an architect, and Saint-Gaudens, a sculptor. Both artistic geniuses who met in their 20s, they came from different New York City backgrounds. Saint-Gaudens was the son of an immigrant French shoe maker, and White was the son of a well-born and connected but impecunious poet. The two friends were aesthetically attuned—Wiencek suggests even romantically attracted—but temperamentally distinct. White was a loud, gregarious, supremely confident, incredibly hard-working man of action, while Saint-Gaudens was introspective, self-doubting, frequently depressed, and incapable of meeting deadlines.
Wiencek guides the reader in a tour of Saint-Gaudens’ masterpieces—the Farragut Monument in Madison Square in New York City, the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial opposite the State House in Boston, and the Adams Memorial in Washington, D.C. Each sculpture is set on an imaginative base designed by White, who also intermediated when unhappy clients threatened to give up on the dilatory sculptor. Without the collaboration, these masterworks might never have been completed.
In Springfield, Massachusetts, we can see the two working together. In Saint-Gaudens’ sculpture The Puritan, Deacon Samuel Chapin, the city’s patriarch, strides across a grand pedestal fringed with foliated decoration typical of White, the classicist. This statue stood only briefly in the landscaped setting White also created. For over a century, it has commanded a place in Merrick Park in the museum quadrangle next to the Central Library.
Time and again, one finds the architect and sculptor working for the same client. Here in the Berkshires, one of White’s earliest masterpieces, the turreted and shingled Naumkeag in Stockbridge, stands out. Thirty-one-year-old White was a new phenomenon in New York architectural circles in 1884 when lawyer Joseph Choate and his wife Caroline hired him to design their country house on Prospect Hill (now owned by the Trustees of Reservations). Tragedy struck the Choates during the design phase of Naumkeag, when in the spring of 1884 their son, Ruluff, a freshman at Harvard, died suddenly of an aneurysm. Today, walking into the elegant White interior of the Choates’ music room at Naumkeag, we can see Saint-Gaudens’ bust of young Ruluff.
While Naumkeag was underway, White was involved with his senior partner Charles McKim on another project in Stockbridge for Choate’s retired law partner, Charles E. Butler. St. Paul’s Episcopal Church was to be a living memorial to Butler’s beloved and charismatic wife, Susan Sedgwick. The baptistry designed by White is a side chapel within the church, a light space in contrast to McKim’s dark, almost tunnel-like nave. Here, children to this day are brought to be baptized, in a space commemorating Susan and their three children, all of whom died before the age of ten.
White, who was connected to Butler by marriage, created a beautiful semi-decagonal space for the baptistry. For the walls, domed ceiling and herringbone patterned floor White chose a combination of polished stones from France—a cream-colored limestone with embedded shell fragments called lumachella, and a reddish-brecciated marble. The pastel decorative windows of flowers, ribbons, and birds are by Tiffany. It is a light, joyful space.
Framed by three cherubs, the memorial tablet is the work of Louis Saint-Gaudens, brother of Augustus. Louis had a continuing relationship with the church benefactor. A decade later, he designed a striking medallion of Butler, now in the collection of the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park in Cornish, New Hampshire, the country home of the Saint-Gaudens family.
Giving us a vivid view of the web of friendships of New York artist, architects, and sculptors in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s, Wiencek artfully describes in his book the inner workings of the early years of the McKim, Mead & White, a firm dominated by the prodigious White. With a formidable recall for striking architectural details seen on travels abroad, deep knowledge of exquisite building materials, and an ability to work obsessively on a project, he expected others in the office do so, too. White had little formal training and had flourished in his 20s under the tutelage of the great architect H.H.Richardson. Edith Wharton, a fellow autodidact, admired White among a handful of his contemporaries who “stirred up the stagnant air of New York.”
Other notable structures in the Berkshires that White designed include Searles Castle in Great Barrington, currently the private residence of renowned artist Hunt Slonem; and the Stockbridge Casino, which is now called the Fitzpatrick Main Stage owned by Berkshire Theatre Group.
In contrast to the ebullient White, who could mix incredible productivity with insatiable social life, Saint-Gaudens was a private prodigy. His contemporary sculptor friend, Daniel Chester French and wife Mary Adams French, understood his preference for small groups. Mary described Saint-Gaudens warmly as “the most sociable and responsive of men and most entertaining.” But he disliked the presence of celebrities, and “he hated being made a lion.” In her Memoirs of a Sculptor’s Wife, Mary chronicled the literary and artistic circles in New York and reflected, “There is one person whom I never remember having seen at the Gilders and that was Saint-Gaudens.” She was referring the high-voltage salon on Gramercy Park of my husband’s great-grandparents, Century Magazine editor Richard Watson Gilder and artist Helena deKay of New York and Tyringham.
Saint-Gaudens did have a personal friendship with the Gilders. He modelled two bas reliefs of them (now in the Metropolitan Museum), and Richard Watson Gilder always took mock pride that those legs of Admiral Farragut, the Civil War hero of “damn the torpedoes fame,” were actually his. As recounted by Wiencek, the Farragut Monument went through many versions over the years before it was finally installed in Madison Square on White’s spectacular undulating bluestone pedestal worthy of a naval hero.
The Farragut was one of Saint-Gaudens’ chronically derailed projects that White cajoled into completion. The great Shaw Memorial in Boston was another. Wiencek devotes a chapter to the 13-year saga of this extraordinary bas relief by Saint-Gaudens, framed by White’s pedestal and Ionic columns. The work commemorates Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th, the Union’s first African-American regiment. Rarely is a statue standing exactly on the site it depicts. Here on Beacon Street, the regiment processed out of Boston in May 1863. Just weeks before, Shaw had been spending his honeymoon in Lenox with Annie Haggerty at her family’s country house, Ventfort (predecessor of Ventfort Hall). She watched the regimental procession from a Beacon Street balcony. John Greenleaf Whittier was also there. Saint-Gaudens captures the poet’s words seeing Shaw headed on a virtually doomed mission, “the flower of grace and chivalry … beautiful and awful, as an angel of God come down to lead the host of freedom to victory.”
Who really were these artists—Saint-Gaudens and White—who could produce such moving, noble, exhilarating works? What were their values and inner lives? Wiencek was determined not to merely write a “bloodless” art history analysis, but to delve into the human natures of these two extraordinarily talented men.
They both worked and lived in a frenzy. The tale of their libertine lives underlies the artistic timeline of their triumphs. A freelance author of scores of books on architectural and social history, Wiencek is a careful researcher. He writes of the human stories—the financial and emotional crises of these two geniuses. Living in lean times on the safety nets of the incomes of their long-suffering wives, White and Saint-Gaudens pursued “sexual adventures” with both men and women. These included Saint-Gaudens’ models, White’s office colleagues, and many an aspiring actress.
Saint-Gaudens’ open philandering brought excitement beyond the domestic worlds of two households—one with his wife, Gussie Homer, and their son in Cornish, New Hampshire, and the other his “secret family” with one-time model, Davida Clark, and their son in Noroton, Connecticut.
White was shamelessly reckless in his pursuit of young women. Ninety years after his demise, White’s great-granddaughter, Suzannah Lessard, wrote of the impact of his lifestyle on his descendants in her book Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family.
Both White and Saint-Gaudens died in their 50s. Saint-Gaudens was suffering from cancer when he heard of White’s murder on June 25, 1906. In front of hundreds of witnesses at the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden (designed by White), millionaire Harry Thaw shot White in a jealous rage over Thaw's actress wife, Evelyn Nesbit. The ensuing “trial of the century” gripped the nation's headlines for more than a year, and Thaw ultimately pled not guilty by reason of insanity.
Saint-Gaudens mourned his beloved friend’s untimely death. He wrote in a letter to Collier's magazine, “As the weeks pass, the horror of the miserable taking away of this big friend looms up more and more. It is unbelievable that we shall never see him again going about among us with his astonishing vitality, enthusiasm and force. In the thirty years that the friendship between him and me endured, his almost feminine tenderness to friends in suffering and his generosity to those in trouble or want stand out most prominently.”
Gus and Stan’s old client, Henry Adams, who wanted to bludgeon them to death back in 1891, long outlived them. In the summer and autumn of 1916, in his late-70s, he rented Ashintully in Tyringham. Here in “the swellest house and [with] the most guests I ever did have,” he reveled in the great Palladian house designed by Francis Hoppin, protégé of White.
Henry Wiencek will lecture on Stan and Gus: Art Ardor and the Friendship that Built the Gilded Age at The Mount in Lenox on Wednesday, July 30, at 5 p.m. For more information and to buy tickets, go to edithwharton.org.