Good Grief

Today we honor the 1848 birth of Augustus Saint-Gaudens with his cemetery sculpture, the Adams Memorial.

This monument to a lost wife is one of America's most hauntingly eloquent sculptures. Remote, solitary, positioned against a wall with no name or identifying inscription, the shrouded figure remains mysterious and inaccessible. Depending on the light source, all features except nose and mouth lie buried in the shadows cast by her hood.

Writer, Harvard professor, and descendant of presidents, Henry Adams commissioned the statue to commemorate his wife, ³Clover² Adams, who committed suicide in 1885. The sculptor fulfilled Adams's wish for a figure to symbolize ³the acceptance, intellectually, of the inevitable.² Sometimes referred to as ³Grief,² the first cast resides in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., over the graves of both Clover and Henry Adams.

The Adams Memorial is part of our traveling exhibition The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, on view at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, through April 21, 2002. Today's portrait of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (shown below) comes from our Peter A. Juley and Son Collection.

Source: Richard Murray. The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).

Pictured top: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1848 Ireland–1907 USA, Adams Memorial, modeled 1886–1891, cast 1969, bronze, 69 7/8 x 40 x 44 3/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum Purchase.

Pictured bottom: Portrait of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1848 Ireland–1907 USA, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Peter A. Juley & Son Collection.