Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1100404
THE CAPITOL DOME 33 Fig. 3. Kenyon Cox (1856–1919) painted a portrait of Augustus Saint-Gaudens in exchange for a bronze relief portrait of himself. Cox painted this replica in 1908 to replace the 1887 original, lost in a 1904 fire; he depicts Saint- Gaudens modeling a portrait relief of artist William Merritt Chase. out the work. It is possible that Thompson, in the early 1870s, was absorbed with two of his commissions in hand—a Civil War Memorial dedicated in 1872 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and the statue of Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, completed in 1873, for the U.S. Soldiers' and Airmen's Home in D.C. But failure to deliver in connection with a commission for work for the Capitol seems more than neglectful and a lost opportunity of considerable significance. It might have seemed inevitable that ompson would not again be approached for work at the august location, and yet his name reappears among the group of "competent sculptors" invited in 1887 "to make a marble bust of each of the vice-presidents, to be placed in the niches of the Senate Chamber." 13 W.A. Wheeler (nineteenth vice president) was the portrait commission assigned to ompson. And yet the bust of Wheeler in the chamber, positioned there in 1892, is the work of Edward Clark Potter. It appears, therefore, that once more ompson failed to deliver. Augustus Saint-Gaudens (fig. 3.), also among this initial group of sculptors commissioned to carve busts for the Senate Chamber, 14 proved more dependable in the exercise, if not immediately gracious in his acceptance. Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin to a French father and an Irish mother, Mary McGuiness, who hailed from County Longford. Taken to America as an infant aged six months, he was raised in New York. Undertaking his initial training in art in that city, he was to spend much time in the course of his life traveling back and forth between the U.S. and Europe. However, in the course of his many trips, and oen not far away in London, he never took the opportunity to visit Ireland. When, towards the end of his career, he was commis- sioned for a work to be located in the centre of Dublin, he proposed at that stage to visit the city of his birth. But