Augustus Saint-Gaudens's monument to Admiral David Farragut…

Augustus Saint-Gaudens's monument to Admiral David Farragut (1881, Madison Square Garden, New York), the base of which is designed by Stanford White, is the most important work of his early career.

Working with La Farge, Saint-Gaudens creates two caryatids for a fireplace in Cornelius Vanderbilt II's residence in 1881.

Born in 1848 in Dublin to a French father and an Irish mother, Saint-Gaudens had moved with his family to New York City when he was an infant and at age thirteen had been apprenticed to a cameo cutter.

He had earned his living at this craft, while studying at night at Cooper Union (1861-65) and the National Academy of Design (1865-66) in New York.

In 1867, he had traveled to Paris and been admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts.

Along with Olin Levi Warner and Howard Roberts, Saint-Gaudens had been one of the first Americans to study sculpture in Paris.

Late in 1870 he had set out for Rome, where, still supporting himself by cameo cutting, he had worked for two years copying famous antique statues on commission.

He had also started to create his first imaginative compositions during this period.

After 1875, he had settled in New York, where he has befriended and collaborated with a circle of men who form the nucleus of an American artistic renaissance: the group includes the architects Henry Hobson Richardson, Stanford White, and Charles Follen McKim and the painter John LaFarge.