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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”
Shaw Memorial, Beacon Street, Boston, commissioned in 1884 and dedicated in 1897.( Anastasia Stanmeyer)
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
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July 2025 BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE // 59