AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS (American, 1848-1907) Portrait Relief of Samuel Gray Ward (7 1/2 x 5 1/2 ...

AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS (American, 1848-1907) Portrait Relief of Samuel Gray Ward artist's monogram (lower left); inscribed and dated 'SAMUEL·GRAY·WARD·NEW YORK·MAY·M·D·C·C·C·L·XXXI·' (upper center); identified and with provenance information (attached to the reverse) bronze with a brown patina 7 1/2 x 5 1/2 in (19.0 x 13.9 cm) Footnotes: Provenance Samuel Gray Ward, New York. Ellen Warder Thoron, Washington, D.C., gift from the previous, 1881. A private collection, Massachusetts, by family descent through from the previous. Literature John H. Dryfhout, The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Hanover, New Hampshire and London: University Press of New England, 1982), pp. 120-21, no. 95 (as a reduction, private collection, Washington, DC). N.B. Samuel Gray Ward (1817-1907) was an American poet, banker, and Transcendentalist. He was closely involved with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Jones Very, and contributed numerous poems to the Transcendentalist journal The Dial. In 1869 Ward became a founding member of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and would sit on the Board of Trustees until 1889. The present work is one of the earliest commissioned works by Saint-Gaudens, who prior to that most often gave works as gifts. It is a reduction of three existing larger reliefs of Samuel Gray Ward also conceived in May of 1881 (as written in the present inscription). These larger works are held respectively at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at the National Portrait Gallery, and in a private collection. The reliefs of Samuel Gray Ward are the lowest reliefs created by Saint-Gaudens and are widely considered some of the finest. We would like to thank Dr. Henry J. Duffy, Curator Emeritus, Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park, for his kind assistance in cataloguing this lot. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing