Brooklyn Museum: Collections: American Art

Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Bust of Abraham Lincoln

Augustus Saint-Gaudens (American, 1848–1907). Bust of Abraham Lincoln, 1922. Bronze, 28 x 17 x 14 in. (71.1 x 43.2 x 35.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Robert B. Woodward Memorial Fund, 23.257

Arguably the best-known sculptor of America's Gilded Age, Augustus Saint-Gaudens was one of many sculptors commissioned to produce memorial portraits of Abraham Lincoln in the decades after the Civil War. This bronze bust is a replica of the head of a standing Lincoln completed by Saint-Gaudens in 1887 on commission for the City of Chicago's Lincoln Park. The subject had personal resonance for the artist, who, as a poor boy in New York, had been one of thousands to view the assassinated president's bier in New York's City Hall. Saint-Gaudens based this likeness on an 1860 life-cast of Lincoln's head made by Leonard Volk. In Saint-Gaudens's clay sketches for the portrait he experimented with a variety of stances and expressions, ultimately representing Lincoln as a noble man, deep in thought. The full-length figure in Lincoln Park is positioned before a chair, as though he had just risen to begin a public address. This replica was cast in 1922, after the artist's death.

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