A Buzzard in Pajamas & Theodore Roosevelt's Remarks at Saint Gaudens Exhibition, Dec., 1908

JCH22

August Saint Gaudens passed on August 3, 1907. TR attended a exhibition of Saint Gauden’s works at the Corcoan Gallery on December 15 1908 (former museum in D.C., part of whose collection moved to the National Gallery of Art in 2014). He delivered very thoughtful remarks which included insights into his view on the importance of the arts in general, and his reflections on St Gauden’s coinage designs. The later are excerpted below:

[Introduction omitted]

Our success in the field of pure art, as in the fields of pure literature and pure science, has been behind the success we have achieved in providing, by the practical application of art and science, for bodily comfort, bodily welfare, and for the extraordinary industrial mechanism which forms the frame-work and skeleton of our modern civilization. The twilight of letters continues; but much is now being done in the field of art; and Saint Gaudens was an artist who can hardly be placed too high.

Before touching on his larger feats, a word as to something of less, but yet of real importance. Saint Gaudens gave us for the first time a beautiful coinage, a coinage worthy of this country, a coinage not yet properly appreciated, but up to which both the official and the popular mind will in the end grow.

The first few thousands of the Saint Gaudens gold coins are, I believe, more beautiful than any coins since the days of the Greeks, and they achieve their striking beauty because Saint Gaudens not only possessed a perfect mastery in the physical address of his craft, but also a daring and original imagination. His full-length figure of Liberty holding the torch is his own conception. His flying eagle and standing eagle are each in its own way equally good. His head of Liberty is not only a strikingly beautiful head, but characteristically and typically American in that for the headdress he has used one of the few really typical, and at the same time really beautiful, pieces of wearing gear ever produced independently on this continent—the bonnet of eagle plumes.

The comments so frequently made upon this eagle-feather headdress illustrate curiously the exceedingly conventional character of much of our criticism and the frequent inability to understand originality until it has won its place. Most of the criticism was based upon the assumption that only an Indian could wear a feather headdress, and that the head of Liberty ought to have a Phrygian cap, or Greek helmet, or some classic equivalent.

Now, of course, this was nonsense. There is no more reason why a feather headdress should always be held to denote an Indian than why a Phrygian cap should always be held to denote a Phrygian. The Indian in his own way finely symbolizes freedom and a life of liberty. It is idle to insist that the head or figure of Liberty shall only appear in the hackneyed and conventional trappings which conventional and unoriginal minds have gradually grown to ascribe to her.

A great artist with the boldness of genius could see that the American Liberty should, if possible, have something distinctively American about her; and it was an addition to the sum of the art of all nations that this particular figure of Liberty should not be a mere slavish copy of all other figures of Liberty. So Saint Gaudens put the American Liberty in an American headdress.

Up to the time of this coin the most beautiful American coin was the small gold coin which carried the Indian’s head with the feather headdress, and we now again have the smaller gold coinage with the Indian’s head: but Saint Gaudens’s was the head of Liberty, the head of the American Liberty, and it was eminently fitting that such a head should carry a very beautiful and a purely and characteristically American headdress.

So much for the Saint Gaudens coins. In dealing with his larger work, I can, of course, speak only as a layman….

TR’s did make a point of addressing the Eagle in detail, no doubt due to criticism like the below which that design received:

TomB

Thank you for these historical posts. I couldn’t help but read this and think of how TR’s comments might be applied to some contemporary versions of Liberty that have not been universally embraced on this forum.

Typekat

That ‘Buzzard in Pajamas’ article, quoting an unnamed “Baltimore bank official” is a classic example that fake news is as old as the hills.

If the writer of the piece wanted an actual aesthetic critique, why didn’t he find an actual artist instead of this supposed bank official?

I think TR really nailed it in his speech, and we have Teddy to thank for releasing us from the bland coinage of Barberity.

oldabeintx

Thanks for sharing this.

Au100

Interesting account...thanks for sharing. Though I admit I disagree with the original author. $10 Indians are gorgeous coins IMHO. There is something about that "Irish" girl wearing an Indian headdress...the profile is dazzling. I realize we had held Phrygian caps with high regard up to that time...but some of them made Ms Liberty look like a he-man woman on various coins; not exactly attractive. Personally I think the $10 Indian is the most beautiful US gold coin design, better than $20 St Gaudens, Liberties, Bust Gold, AGE's and the 2024 Flowing Hair gold commemorative.

$10 Indians rock!

Clackamas1

Ken Burns has a great special now playing on PBS about DaVinci. When you see how DaVinci drew the perfect proportions of humans you can directly see it in St. Gaudin's work. It is a series worth watching.