Both Adolph Weinman and Augustus St. Gaudens provided beautiful obverse and reverse designs for the US Mint.
Let’s take a look at the Ultra High Relief recently released using the St. Gaudens design:
The design is still beautiful today.
Early in his career, Mr. Weinman worked as an assistant to St. Gaudens. For a sculptor, Mr. Weinman gave many speeches through the years. In them, he remembers St. Gaudens with several anecdotes.
The speeches can be found at Adolph A. Weinman papers, 1890-1959. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
These are just a few of the comments Mr. Weinman made in his speeches:
Frame #1075
“Much has been said about Augustus Saint Gaudens, the great sculptor, but relatively little about Saint Gaudens, the man, except in the very excellent biography written by his son, Homer. I, with quite a few others, have had the good fortune to assist Saint Gaudens in his work, and I dare say that no one who came in such close contact with him could fail to find in him the lovable human being he really was.
An intense worker, who put forth his utmost effort in everything he undertook, minding no end of labor to achieve a splendid final result, he was naturally highly temperamental, but withal kindly and considerate to those about him.
He had a host of friends, but I believe his most ardent admirers were his pupils and assistants. He had a natural, manly way about him that made him beloved by all that knew him well.”
Frame #1082
“It all reminds me of my early days, when an assistant at Saint Gaudens’ studio. I noted one morning that he was extremely nervous and irritable, went to his desk every once in a while and jotted down some notes and did some cussing in a low key. It all seemed so unusual, except the cussing, that I finally ventured to remark that he did not seem to be in the best of spirits. He then told me that he had consented to speak at some banquet, that he knew he couldn’t do it, tried to get out of it, and wasn’t permitted and here he was but a day away from the event and didn’t know what to tell his audience. He said that he had been worried for the past two weeks and was certain that he would be mortified for two months after the dreadful event.
He said that no sculptor should ever attempt to make speeches and that he knew only on who could do it well but he was a very bad sculptor.”
Frame #1086
“Of all the great men in American Sculpture who impressed me most, I will mention first Augustus Saint Gaudens, in whose studio I worked as an assistant for about two years. A man of striking personality, highly temperamental, and with a strange mixture of impetuosity and inexhaustible patience with his work, he was an inspiration to anyone fortunate enough to know him well. He never ceased to make changes, fairly exhausting himself in his efforts to produce a perfect work of art.”
Frames #1139-40
“It was in 1895 and 1896 that I worked as an assistant to Augustus Saint Gaudens. When he decided to remove his studio to Paris to complete the Sherman Monument for this city, three of us assistants began packing up photographic records of his work and other important data, when we came upon a box of photographs of plastic sketches apparently all for one statue. Getting curious, we laid them out upon the studio floor and there were no less than 98 photographs of his sketches for his Peter Cooper statue, no two of which were entirely alike and many of them entirely different from one another.
This was the result of his constant effort to give the very best that he had in him, his constant search for perfection, that thing on which no two agree and that, when almost reached, eludes us again and leaves us with an ever stronger desire for greater perfection.”
Frames #1220-21
“St. Gaudens was a man of remarkably magnetic personality, intensely temperamental and of striking personal appearance, whom I shall always remember with great affection, despite the fact that there was one fault in his general makeup, he habitually forgot to pay his assistants at a specified time and that is the way he was about money generally. Sometimes there was a period of two or three weeks of anxious waiting for the ghost to walk and I remember an incident when he was absent from the studio for a prolonged period, leaving Ardisson (his factotum of many years), Keck, Payne and myself completely stranded moneywise, but Payne with his inventive mind solved the problem by proposing to hock a gold medal that has been lying on the Saint’s desk and he was forthwith elected a committee of one to do the hocking and he came back with $40 which, split four ways, greatly enhanced our financial status. – The Saint returned, the medal was speedily replaced and all was serene, with our pockets bulging with several weeks pay.”
The booklet included with the Ultra High Relief coin certainly underscores much of what Mr. Weinman had to say about St. Gaudens — an interesting and driven man.