Saint Gaudens and his wife Augusta at Cornish, N.H.
 

With few exceptions, July is the most beautiful month of the year. It is soft and beautiful like a lovely girl with flowers in her hair, and I am a romantic, a little old, and foolish.

Come to think of it, you don’t see many beautiful girls running about with flowers in their hair anymore. It must have been a pretty sight. I sometimes think that most of these girls existed only in pre-Raphaelite art. But still, it’s a pretty image from a golden and far-distant age that never really was – except maybe in Cornish, New Hampshire.

Some say that Cornish is the most beautiful spot on earth. The sky has a blueness unmatched anywhere. It was here that Maxfield Parrish painted his wonderful and dreamy images of a wonderful and dreamy world which seemed to exist beyond imagination. This world was populated by beautiful people who lived in a lush landscape under an impossibly lovely sky of blue.

In fact, these skies were so deliciously blue, and had such an intensity, that today this blue is named for the artist who translated it to canvas, “Maxfield Parrish Blue.” Yet it was not by accident that Parrish migrated to Cornish. He had been all but summoned there by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who had gathered a colony of artists about him that included fellow sculptor Daniel Chester French. The women of Cornish were considered by the artists to be the most beautiful on earth. There was a huge competition to have them pose.

Saint-Gaudens was at the center of it all. He was a self-made man in many ways. A poor son of Irish stock from the streets of New York, he had a dream to be an artist, a sculptor.

At age 12, Saint-Gaudens was apprenticed and carved cameos. Throughout his life, he loved the human face in profile. He declaimed that the profile was the essence of art. Saint-Gaudens once burst out, “The full figure is an offense to the gods!”

Saint-Gaudens is famed for many works of art, including his monuments to General Sherman and Admiral Farragut, and the beautiful nude image of “Dianna” sculpted to adorn Stanford White’s “Madison Square Garden”. This wonderful and elegant sculpture was modeled after the beautiful body of Saint-Gaudens’ mistress Davida. Needless to say, his wife could not stand the sight of it.

Alas, poor White was shot to death atop his own “Madison Square Garden”, under the watchful eye of Saint-Gaudens’ “Dianna,” by Harry K. Thaw. Thaw had fallen in love with, and indeed married, a young girl whose chief claim to fame was that she swung on a red velvet swing in a posh restaurant wearing not much more than a fetching smile.  White had enjoyed the favors of this same young lady years earlier, and although Thaw forgave the woman her questionable past, he never forgave White his involvement.

Saint-Gaudens lost a friend and patron when Thaw shot and killed White. Old Harry also got away with murder. Later he would plead insanity and spend some time in a hospital here in the United States.

Saint-Gaudens’ other great patron, friend and admirer was none-other-than President Theodore Roosevelt. A man of great taste and vision, Roosevelt was revolted by the coinage in circulation in 1901. He considered it ugly and unworthy of a great nation that was now an imperialistic and industrial world power. He wanted a new coinage which reflected the glory of the nation and which would rival the beautiful coinage of Greece of ancient times.

Saint-Gaudens gave himself over to this task and produced the coins shown here. Roosevelt was pleased, and sent warmest congratulations to “The Saint”, but “The Saint’s” days were numbered. The great man was being eaten away by cancer.

He tried to live his life well. He loved golf and had golf balls made of chocolate candy for the children. These were wrapped in foil. When he drove the balls over his vast acres, the children of Cornish raced after them laughing and falling over themselves with glee.

Saint-Gaudens was loved by the town’s people of Cornish and by the members of the large art colony there. Even historian Charles Francis Adams, grandson of one president and great-grandson of another, was his friend and visited Cornish.

By 1905, Augustus Saint-Gaudens once a brilliant light, had almost burned out, and he knew it, as did the people of the artist’s colony and the village of Cornish. They created a special festival, “The Festival of the Golden Bowl” in his honor.

A marble altar was built to hold a golden bowl of burning incense. The men, women, and children of Cornish donned togas and flowing robes. They wrote a play in which Zeus, tired of his duties as King of the Gods, resigned his throne. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was elected king in Zeus’ place. Saint-Gaudens and his long-suffering and

hard-to-suffer wife were drawn around the fields and hills of Cornish by his worshippers and friends. The divine spell was only broken for a moment by “The Saints’” bride who yelled out, “Watch out for the paint, Gus. It’s wet.”

The people drew their new king in a chariot over the hills and fields of beautiful Cornish filled with love for their “Saint.” All the while beautiful young women, with flowers in their hair, danced around and about him as he was proclaimed to all the hills and the blue sky above the “New King of the Gods.”

That day was all beautiful and now, like Saint-Gaudens, gone. It is all but lost in the mists of time in the passing of these 99 summers. Yet, the image of that day still engages my imagination even though it all took place 39 summers before I was born.

	Augustus Saint-Gaudens was one of 35 Americans honored in 1940 on a special series of stamps called “The Famous Americans.” His “Adams Monument” appears on this first day cover.
	Theodore Roosevelt, pictured on the 30 cent value of the 1938 definitive series of stamps, gave Saint-Gaudens the commission to redesign the ten and twenty dollar gold coins.
	Daniel Chester French was also honored in the 1940 Famous American series. He was also to summer in Cornish. Note French’s “The Minute Man” which was depicted on the 1925 Lexington-Concord commemorative half dollar.

	The Saint-Gaudens ten dollar gold coin is considered one of our most handsome. This is a pattern of the original design.		The Saint-Gaudens twenty dollar gold coin is considered the most beautiful of all the coins minted by the United States.
	Although this coin is very rare, it’s design was considered dull by Roosevelt. This design dominated the nation’s two-and-a-half dollar, five dollar, ten dollar, and twenty dollar gold coinage for almost 70 years until 1907.

          My Calendar

       If you Journal readers want to catch up with me, this is where I will be:  On July 4th, I will be at Richard Murphy’s N.E.S.S. show in Dedham, Mass. at the Holiday Inn near the intersection of Routes 1A and 128.  Show hours are 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. On July 11th, I will be at Tom Lacey’s Greater Worcester Show in Auburn, Mass., at the Best Western Yankee Drummer on Route 12, just off the Massachusetts Turnpike at Exit 10. The show hours are 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. On July 25th, I will be at Ernie Botte’s Westford Show at the Westford Regency Inn. To get there, take Exit 32 off Route 495, proceed to Route 110 to the Westford Regency Inn. Show hours are 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.  Hope to see you there!

You may email Jim Johnston at johnstonjim8@aol.com  You may also wish to check Jim's website for further updates.   www.johnstonantiques.com