Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907)

The original Amor Caritas bronze relief (8 x 4 ft.) is in the collection of the Musée de Louvre, Paris. Augustus Saint-Gaudens produced approximately thirty bronze reductions of the model, and more than half of the bronzes in the scale of the present work are now in American public collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan; the University of Miami Library, Miami, Florida; the R.W. Norton Gallery, Shreveport, Louisiana; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island; the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire; and the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington. The present reduction is highly unusual in that it is gilded; there are only three other known gilded examples, two of which are in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri. Additionally, in 1918, some years after the sculptor’s death, another bronze cast in the original large scale was produced for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.