Before the Farragut

This essay corrects the assertion that Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Admiral David Glasgow Farragut Monument (Madison Square Park, New York) and the widespread publicity it generated was “the beginning of a new era.” The critical response to significant commissions in Saint-Gaudens’s early career has thus far been undervalued: his role in the decoration of Saint Thomas Church and his portrait bust of Theodore Dwight Woolsey, shown at the Society of American Artists in 1880. Far from unknown in New York, the center of the American art world, Saint-Gaudens was poised, well before the Farragut, to launch into the national public eye.