This studio was given up when Saint-Gaudens went abroad for the third time, in 1897, to execute the Sherman group, and he never resumed his residence in New York.  In 1885 he had purchased a property at Cornish, N.H., just across the Connecticut River from Windsor, Vt., and when he returned to this country in 1900, covered with fresh honors but an ill man, he made what had been a summer home his permanent abode.  He named it Aspet, after his father’s birthplace, and there he erected two studios and finished his Sherman statue.  In these studios were executed the second “Lincoln,” the Parnell statue for Dublin, and much other work.  The larger studio was burned in 1904, but was rebuilt and the lost work re-begun and carried to a conclusion.  What can never be quite replaced were two portraits of himself.  A study, of the head only, in the collection of the National Academy of Design and a sketch by Will H. Low, painted in Paris in 1877, are now the only existing portraits of him done from life in his best years.  The Metropolitan Museum possesses a portrait of him in his last years, by Miss Ellen Emmet, and a replica, painted since his death, of my own earlier portrait.

From the illness he brought back from Paris in 1900 Saint-Gaudens never recovered.  At times he showed something of his old vigor and was able not only to do fine work but to indulge more in out-of-door sports than he had ever done in his youth, while a growing love for nature and for literature made his life fuller, in some respects, than in the days when his own art more entirely absorbed him.  But year by year his strength grew less and his intervals of freedom from pain grew shorter, and he was more and more forced to rely upon the corps of able and devoted assistants which he gathered about him.  He developed to an extraordinary extent the faculty of communicating his ideas and desires to others and of producing through their hands work essentially his own and of a quality entirely beyond their ability; but it was at the cost of a strain upon brain and nerve almost infinitely greater than would have been involved in work done with his own hand.  In the summer of 1906 he broke down utterly, the work of his studio was interrupted, and he ceased to see even his most intimate friends.  He rallied somewhat from this attack, and began again his heroic struggle against fate, directing the work of assistants while himself so weak that he had to be carried from the house to the studio.  The end came on the evening of August 3, 1907.  He died as he had lived, a member of no church, but a man of pure and lofty character.  As he had wished, his body was cremated, and his ashes were temporarily deposited in the cemetery at Windsor, Vt., across the river from his home.  An informal funeral service was held in his private studio on August 7, attended by friends and neighbors and by a few old friends from a distance; but the gathering could include but a few of the many who felt his death as a personal loss.