Frances Folsom Cleveland

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Saint-Gaudens began modelling a low-relief portrait of Frances Folsom Cleveland (1864-1947), wife of President Grover Cleveland, while both were guests at the summer home of Helena and Richard Gilder in Marion, Massachusetts, in August 1887, completing the seventeen-inch medallion in 1892. It depicts Frances Cleveland one year after her marriage to the President, at age twenty-three, wearing an upswept hairstyle and a fashionable, high-collared dress. In late 1901, Saint-Gaudens reduced the scale of the plaster medallion to five-and-a-half inches in diameter, and early in 1902 he cast it in bronze and presented this example to Richard Gilder as a birthday present.

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