HENRY WIENCEK TO TALK ABOUT HIS NEW BOOK ON ARCHITECT STANFORD WHITE AND SCULPTOR AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS
“ 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.”
STAN AND GUS
HENRY WIENCEK TO TALK ABOUT HIS NEW BOOK ON ARCHITECT STANFORD WHITE AND SCULPTOR AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS
56 // BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE Holiday August July 2025 2025 2023
B y C o r n e l i a B r o o k e G i l d e r
“ 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