The merits of Saint-Gaudens’s work were fully recognized in his lifetime.  He was an officer of the Legion of Honor, a Corresponding Member of the Institute of France, a member of half a dozen academies, and the bearer of honorary degrees from the universities of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.  But of all the honors he received there were two, one of a public, the other of a private nature, which he himself valued most highly:  the one as showing the estimation in which his art was held by his fellow artists, the other as an evidence of the personal affection felt for him by his friends.  At the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, upon the unanimous recommendation of the Jury of Fine Arts, composed of painters, sculptors, and architects, he was awarded a special diploma and medal of honor, “apart from and above all other awards,” an entirely exceptional honor, which marked him as the first of American artists, as previously received honors had marked him one of the greatest sculptors of his time.  On June 23, 1905, the artistic and literary colony which had gradually grown up about his home in Cornish celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his coming there by a fete and open-air masque held in the groves of Aspet.  The beauty of this spectacle has become almost legendary.  The altar with its columned canopy, which served for a background to the play, still stands, or recently stood, though much dilapidated by weather, as it was immortalized by the sculptor himself in a commemorative plaquette (Pl. 23) which is among the most charming of his minor works.  He planned if he had lived to perpetuate it in enduring marble, and this task has now been taken up by his wife, who means to dedicate the monument as a fitting memorial to a great artist and a noble man in the place he loved as his chosen home.

Some part of the vivid and lovable personality of Augustus Saint-Gaudens must have been visible, almost at a glance, to any one who ever came in contact with him—­to any one, even, who ever saw his portrait.  In his spare but strong-knit figure, his firm but supple hands, his manner of carrying himself, his every gesture, one felt the abounding vitality, the almost furious energy of the man.  That extraordinary head, with its heavy brow beetling above the small but piercing eyes, its red beard and crisp, wiry hair, its projecting jaw and great, strongly modelled nose, was alive with power—­with power of intellect no less than of will.  His lack of early education gave him a certain diffidence and a distrust of his own gifts of expression.  He was apt to overrate the mere verbal facility of others and to underestimate himself in the comparison—­indeed, a certain humility was strongly marked in him, even as regards his art, though he was self-confident also.  When he was unconstrained his great powers of observation, his shrewdness of judgment, his bubbling humor, and a picturesque vivacity of phrase not uncommon among artists made him one of the most entrancing of talkers.