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THE CAPITOL DOME 34 it was not to be. He was diagnosed with cancer shortly after receiving the commission for the monu- ment to Charles Stewart Parnell and, although he man- aged to complete the statue, Saint-Gaudens never made the journey and died before the monument was erected. Among the Senate Chamber commissions, Saint- Gaudens portrayed twentieth Vice President Chester A. Arthur (fig. 4), who only served briefly in that office in 1881 before assuming the position of president on the assassination of James A. Garfield. It was Arthur who, the day before he died, chose that Saint-Gaudens would portray him. 15 Although honored to have been selected by the sitter, the sculptor was, nonetheless, unhappy about the $800 that he was offered for the commission—the exact sum that all the chosen sculp- tors were to be paid for their busts—and refused to take on the work. 16 But, in a change of heart the following year, Saint-Gaudens accepted the commission "under the conditions [already] named," on the basis that he could not commit to a completion date, such was the extent of his "present engagements." 17 In spite of this agreement, Saint-Gaudens seems to have continued to dispute the proposed payment, 18 but did complete the bust, although not without making use of the assistance of a marble cutter. 19 Other portrait work by Saint-Gaudens on site includes the busts of Chief Justices Roger B. Taney and Morrison Waite for the Supreme Court. The Taney (fig. 5) was a controversial commission, and Taney himself remains a contentious figure. First mooted in 1865 and debated at length by Congress at the time, the bust was finally agreed to in 1874. 20 e commission to Saint-Gaudens in 1876, from the Joint Committee on the Library, was not for an original work, but came with specific requirements that the bust be a "faithful copy of the head" of William H. Rinehart's statue of Taney in Annapolis. 21 It was also required of the sculptor that the head be turned to the le. 22 is last request was presumably related to the intended location of the bust. Reproducing Rinehart's bust proved problematic for Saint-Gaudens because it was an idealised portrait and not the familiar features of the sitter that he would have preferred to depict. 23 e bust, with which Saint- Gaudens was not particularly happy 24 and for which he received $700, was acquired for the Supreme Court in 1877. e Waite bust was purchased by the U.S. Govern- ment for $1,500 in 1891 and was, according to Edward Clark, "much admired by all who have seen it." 25 at payments to Saint-Gaudens for work at the Capitol more than doubled in the 14 years between 1877 and 1891 is evidence of his rise in stature within the profession over that period. By the latter date Saint-Gaudens was prob- Fig. 4. Chester A. Arthur, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), 1891 Fig. 5. Roger B. Taney, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1876–77