Samuel Gray Ward

Although the circumstances leading to Saint-Gaudens' modeling of Samuel Gray Ward's likeness are not known, this bas-relief was one of the sculptor's earliest portrait commissions. Ward (1817–1907) was a founder of the Metropolitan Museum and its first treasurer. Over his long lifetime, he cultivated myriad artistic and literary interests while working as a financier. He was an intimate of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his circle, and an enthusiastic patron of the arts, particularly prints. Of the more than eighty reliefs Saint-Gaudens completed, he considered Ward's portrait one of his finest efforts. The sense that the sculptor's clay approaches the immediacy of paint is particularly evident in the...