Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site

A unit of the National Park Service, the site features the home, gardens, and studios of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), one of America's greatest sculptors. Saint-Gaudens was encouraged to come to Cornish, New Hampshire, was looking for a summer studio away from the New York City heat, where he could work on an increasing number of commissions. The sculptor rented an old inn called "Huggins' Folly," a federal-style building with hay barn and stables. After the sculptor's death, his wife Augusta Homer Saint-Gaudens (1848-1926) arranged a large traveling retrospective of his work, and opened the studios at Aspet to the public.

Saint-Gaudens' first life-size sculpture, created in Rome, was the Iroquois chief Hiawatha as a youth and since it was not a commissioned piece the sculptor could not afford to cast or to carve his clay model. Montgomery Gibbs, one of Saint-Gaudens' early patrons, saw the clay model and provided money to have it cast in plaster. After 1874, the former governor of New York, Edwin D. Morgan, commissioned a marble version. And later Morgan was influential in the award of the commission for Saint-Gaudens' Farragut Monument. Other works of Saint-Gaudens include several cameos, busts, and life-sized monuments including Standing Lincoln, located in Chicago's Lincoln Park, and the Sherman Monument, which can be found in New York's Central Park.

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