Charles F. McKim, Stanford White, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Charles F. McKim, Stanford White, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In summer 1878 Saint-Gaudens and the architects Stanford White (1853-1906) and Charles McKim (1847-1909) departed from Paris for an eleven-day holiday to central and southern France. Soon thereafter Saint-Gaudens fashioned this sketchy, lighthearted medallion as a souvenir for the trio, replete with reminders of the trip. White’s leonine features appear at the top, with McKim’s balding compacted head at the right and Saint-Gaudens’s angular profile at the left. Around the rough edge are shorthand notations of the towns they visited while in the center appear the tools of their trades: sculptor’s mallet and architect’s dividers and T-square, as well as miniature representations of Claus Sluter’s Moses Fountain near Dijon and the twelfth-century Romanesque church at Saint-Gilles. This cast originally belonged to White.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Charles F. McKim, Stanford White, and Augustus Saint-GaudensCharles F. McKim, Stanford White, and Augustus Saint-GaudensCharles F. McKim, Stanford White, and Augustus Saint-GaudensCharles F. McKim, Stanford White, and Augustus Saint-GaudensCharles F. McKim, Stanford White, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens

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.