the figure visible beneath
the draperies. In the hands of a master of the figure--of one of those
artists to whom the expressiveness and the beauty of the human structure
is all in all--drapery is a means of rendering the masses and the
movement of the figure more apparent than they would be in the nude. In
such works as these it is a thing beautiful in itself, for its own
ripple and flow and ordered intricacy. The figure is there beneath
the drapery, but the drapery is expressive of the mood of the artist and
of the sentiment of the work rather than especially explanatory of the
figure.

[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 24.--Saint-Gaudens. "Amor Caritas."]

First of all, by nature and by training, Saint-Gaudens was a designer,
and exquisiteness of design was the quality he most consciously strove
for--the quality on which he expended his unresting, unending,
persevering toil. From the start one feels that design is his principal
preoccupation, that he is thinking mainly of the pattern of the whole,
its decorative effect and play of line, its beauty of masses and spaces,
its fitness for its place and its surroundings; in a word, its
composition. In the beginning, as a workman in the shop of the cameo
cutter, he was concerned with a kind of art in which perfection of
composition is almost the sole claim to serious consideration. Then he
produces a multiplicity of small reliefs, dainty, exquisite, infallibly
charming in their arrangement--things which are so dependent on design
for their very existence that they seem scarcely modelled at all. He
goes on to decorative figures in the round, to heroic statues, to
monumental groups, but always it is design that he thinks of first and
last--design, now, in three dimensions rather than in two--design
properly sculptural rather than pictorial, in so much as it deals with
bosses and concaves, with solid matter in space--but still design. This
power of design rises to higher uses as time goes on, is bent to the
interpretation of lofty themes and the expression of deep emotions, but
it is in its nature the same power that produced the delicate, ethereal
beauty of the reliefs. The infinite fastidiousness of a master designer,
constantly reworking and readjusting his design, that every part shall
be perfect and that no fold or spray of leafage shall be out of its
proper place, never satisfied that his composition is beyond improvement
while an experiment remains untrie