Homer Schiff Saint-Gaudens

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Here, Saint-Gaudens depicted his seventeen-month-old son, Homer Schiff Saint-Gaudens (1880–1958), seated in a child’s chair, the folds of his garment escaping its confines and his pudgy left hand gripping its arm. As the inscription, rendered in the sculptor’s characteristic lettering style, attests, the original portrait in bronze was presented to Dr. Henry Shiff, Saint-Gaudens’s Paris confidant and Homer’s namesake (with a slight variation in spelling). The sculptor kept another bronze on a wall of his Thirty-Sixth Street studio in New York City; it is visible in the background of Kenyon Cox’s painting of Saint-Gaudens (08.130).

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art